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Over Life’s Edge 


BY 

VICTORIA CROSS 

Author of “Daughters of Heaven,” etc. 








NEW YORK 

THE MACAULAY COMPANY 



Copyright, 1921, 

By VIVIEN CORY GRIFFEN 
Copyright, 1922, 

By VIVIEN CORY GRIFFEN 


All rights reserved 


Printed in tin *' " of America 




g)C!,A674196 


Dedicated 


TO 

My Beautiful and Adored 
MOTHER 

'The time shall not outrun 

MY THINKING OF THEE." 


t 


CONTENTS 


CHAP. 


PAGE 

I. 

Joy .... , 

I 

IL 

Horror . . . . 

63 

III. 

Regret 

82 

IV. 

Happiness . . . . 

. 100 

V. 

Adventure . . . . 

. 138 

VL 

Starlight on the Sea . 

. 203 

VII. 

Rejoicing . . . , 

. 210 



OVER LIFE’S EDGE 



OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


CHAPTER I 

JOY 

Low tide. Far out, a gleaming line of darkest 
blue against the warm azure of the sky. Here 
under the foot firm brown sand turned golden in 
the sunshine. Broad plains of it on every side, 
stretching away on the one hand to where the little 
white waves curl on the rim of the sea, and on the 
other to the foot of the cliffs, up to the threshold 
of those huge caverns — fit banqueting halls for 
Gods and Titans — which are the glory of this 
rocky coast. Before the eye, far as it can pierce 
the distance, stretch these wondrous sands, their 
beauty enhanced by the great ridges of black and 
pinnacled rock extending from the land, like arms, 
towards the sea. Huge fragments of the same 
rock lie scattered over the shining golden floor, 
looking like the forgotten toys of the giants who 
inhabit the caves. And at the base of all these 
rocks, what pools ! Clear as crystal, green as an 
emerald, with blue shadows in their ripples, they 

I 


2 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


lie embedded in their rounded sandy hollows, 
gleaming, shimmering, throwing up golden lights 
to the rock above them. Some of these pools are 
small and isolated, lying close under the rocks, 
sombre and green and dark. Others extend into 
a great chain of lakes connected by restless glitter- 
ing streams, and lie out in the open boldly reflect- 
ing the blue of the sunny sky, and filled with rip- 
pling, wavering lights as the breeze plays over 
them. And so the vista goes on mile after mile, 
the glorious general scheme ever the same — tower- 
ing cliffs of the land, bright blue band of the sea, 
and between, wide swept floor of sand, ahead end- 
less promontories in fainter and fainter lines of 
blue, the same scheme, but with countless varia- 
tions of detail: no jagged peak, no carved edge 
of rock alike, each gleaming pool a different shape, 
a different tint. 

There was no sound of Man. The sparkling air 
was serene and unshattered by the hideous human 
voice, or horrid tramp of the human foot. It was 
filled with the enchanting melody of the distant sea, 
the joyous cry of the white-winged gull, and the 
soft notes of the larks singing over the land. From 
the cliff edge where the velvety green verdure 
falls over the rim, and the cliff face shews warmly 
yellow and sandy, came the call of the choughs, for 
countless thousands of them have their homes 
there, and the sea gulls, whether planing smoothly 
in the tranquil air or standing at the edge of the 
cool fresh pools, made a vision of loveliness with 


JOY 3 

their snowy breasts, and heads, and the tender 
blue-grey tints upon their wings. 

It was early morning, and there seemed a sense 
of radiant activity everywhere! a sparkle in the 
sunlight, a freshness In the little breeze, a gaiety 
In the dancing air that belongs to the morning 
alone. 

And through this brilliant harmony of light, 
colour and song, wending its way round rock and 
pool, passed a solitary silent figure. It was a man’s 
figure, and as such would have rather spoiled the 
dazzling picture, had not the gulls circled round 
him closely, and unafraid, as though they said, 
“We know this is a friend,” and a friend indeed 
he was, for Dudley Grant was an artist, with all 
the artist’s creative ability, and the artist’s love for 
all created things. He walked now with the w^hlte 
wings dipping and wheeling all about him, follow- 
ing the gay freedom of their movements with sad 
and longing eyes. For he was a prisoner, chained 
and bound, and oppressed, and burdened as most 
wretched human beings are, and his soul was lost 
in a black desolatlofl and a melancholy wrapped 
him round that the lovely brilliance of the scene 
all about him could not dispel. 

As he walked now, as his eyes travelled over 
sunlit pool, and seaweed-covered rock, he was filled 
with an inexpressible longing, a hunger so wild 
and Intense, a craving so fierce, that it dominated, 
practically obliterated, every other emotion. There 
was one thought in his brain, one cry in his heart, 


4 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


one hopeless desire, tearing like a wild animal 
through his whole system, ravaging and destroying 
it. He stopped suddenly in his walk beside one 
of the green salt pools, and with the point of his 
stick traced slowly with lingering affectionate 
touches on the sand, the name VIOLET CRESS- 
WELL. 

The white gulls circled close over his head as he 
wrote, and rose with soft cries into the air. To 
the man’s ears they echoed VIOLET CRESS- 
WELL, in the sunlight, and VIOLET CRESS- 
WELL called the birds from the cliffs’ edge and 
gave it up to the larks singing in the blue sky, and 
they dropped it again softly to his ears. And one 
face swam before him, and round him, on the satin 
surface of the sand, on the black rocks, against 
the golden cliff, her face that he should never 
see again except in this way, conjured up by the 
futile agony and madness in his brain. “VIOLET 
CRESSWELL,” he murmured to himself, when 
he had finished the scroll upon the ground. “She 
is near, she is near,” cried the gulls, and he stared 
up at them blankly, for Violet was lost to him for 
ever, gone from him over life’s edge, and he could 
leap from that edge after her into the unknown, 
but she could never climb back again into this 
little world to him. Violet, the one being round 
whose image all the inner life of his soul twined 
and clung as a creeping plant twines round a pillar, 
lives while it stands and is crushed in its fall. 
Many women in succession capture the impulses 


s. 


JOY 

and senses of a man during his life. There is 
never more than one, and generally not that who 
holds an absolute rule over all his mental organi- 
sation. 

But she had done so, and he knew now, four 
years after her death, that he was chained to this 
gnawing agony for the rest of his life. If four 
years had not lessened that agony by one single 
point he recognised that the passing over of time 
held no healing power for him. The man sen- 
tenced to imprisonment for life when the grey 
prison walls close round him, the man who knows 
himself in the grip of a fatal and progressive dis- 
ease, may feel somewhat as he felt, something of 
the hopeless, grim despair which he felt, standing 
free, young, strong, upon that radiant shore, in 
the dawning light of the early summer day. 

After a few seconds, he threw himself full 
length upon the sunny sand, and put his head down 
on the words, so delicately traced, closing his eyes 
to shut in the biting scalding tears that forced 
their way between the lids. “Why is it,” he 
thought, “that the human being always make such 
a tangled mass of pain out of his span of life? 
The animals, except where oppressed by man, live 
joyous, free, unshackled lives, but man never, no 
matter what his gifts, what his powers, misery and 
servitude dog his footsteps to the grave.” His 
thoughts travelled backwards through the years, 
back to rosy stretches of existence, behind him, 


6 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


when life had been dear and sweet, and every 
hour had rainbow-tinted wings. 

He was now thirty-five, and his mind sped back 
to his eager strenuous youth, days of fierce, lonely 
study in his college days, his triumphs at Christ- 
church, and then the glorious awakening to the 
fact that he had a special gift: that without effort 
his hand could draw and paint as the common 
hand cannot, that his eye could see divine glories 
In what was mere stone and dust to the common 
eye. And his determination to follow the road 
Fate indicated to him had been Instant and un- 
shakable, and had been followed by those brilliant 
years of study and work, and travel In Italy and 
France, Egypt, Athens and Constantinople. Oh, 
those wonderful days for ever past, of wild en- 
thusiasm for the beauty of the world, days when 
his heart w^as fresh and young and sang of Itself 
for simple joy in being alive! A golden thread 
had run through all his life, for Violet was living 
then, and his love for her had bound all his other 
joys together. He was like one carrying fruits 
and flowers in a golden thread basket. His 
thoughts leapt to the first meeting with her. As 
a boy of thirteen he had one day In careless play 
upon the staircase burst into her bedroom in his 
parents’ house, where she was staying, and saw 
her — a child of seven — seated on the floor, sur- 
rounded by a sea of written sheets of foolscap 
paper. She had looked up at him gravely. “Don’t 
walk on them,” she said merely, “they are a 


7 


JOY 

story,” and then bent her head again, and con- 
tinued writing. He had very gently entered and 
closed the door behind him, and then seated him- 
self also on the floor, and picked up a sheet and 
read, and read, and read. It was but a child’s 
story, but that Intensity that afterwards made her 
famous, gripped him, and held him there reading 
till all the sheets were read. 

‘‘Do you like it?” she had asked him smiling. 
She looked like a little fairy, slight and golden- 
haired, sitting in the midst of her magic web of 
words. 

“I think it is a wonderful story,” he had an- 
swered simply. “What makes you write it?” 

“Somebody sitting beside me makes me write 
it,” she had answered, and the boy nodded 
gravely. He understood. Only that morning 
he had been translating Anacreon’s ode in which 
the poet calls his Muse to him and embraces her, 
and he realised now that the “somebody sitting 
beside” his little golden-haired friend was her 
Muse, and as inexorable as Anacreon’s. Then an- 
other scene rushed into his memory, the day when 
Violet, then herself thirteen, had come to him 
with a finished manuscript, and told him with 
laughing eyes, how it had been accepted by a Lon- 
don publisher, who had not the faintest idea with 
whom he was dealing, who wrote to her always, 
Dear Sir, and who, she had accidentally heard, 
considered the manuscript “the work of a polished 
man of the world of fifty.” And the wonder of 


8 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


that manuscript! He remembered how all the 
force of it had appealed to him, how he had 
realized that the name of this child before him 
would soon be known all over the world, and in 
seven years from that time, seven years of hard 
fighting against the insensate jealousy and fury 
that genius always arouses in the less gifted herd, 
she had more than fulfilled his prophecy. He saw 
her again float before his mental vision as she 
was at twenty, in the dawn of her success, in the 
full triumph of her powers over the ears of men. 
He had found her just dressed for a dance, a 
shimmering vision of white and gold, and she had 
laughed at him, not mockingly, but sweetly and 
gently and consolingly, for he had come hot with 
anger, and mad with Indignation, from his club, 
where he had heard her abused and defamed, and 
after pouring out some of the least atrocious of 
the stories circulated about her, he had begged her 
to marry him, that he might protect her name from 
such infamies, and her laughing answer came back 
to his ears, “Why, Dudley, what does it matter 
what they say? You remember Horace’s line, 
‘Alunt, quid aiunt? Alantl’ One can’t expect all 
the fun and all the money that comes from being 
celebrated without some disadvantage I People 
must express their hate and envy somehow. Just 
think! What they would like to do would be 
to burn my books in the market place, and then 
drag me out and blind and maim me, and tear me 
to pieces with red hot pincers, but fortunately as I 


9 


JOY 

live in a moderately civilised time and place, they 
can’t do that, so they retire to their clubs, and talk 
scandal about me instead, which I don’t mind a 
bit, so why should you? It amuses them, and 
doesn’t hurt me,” 

‘‘It might.” 

‘‘I don’t see how it can, when there’s not a 
shadow of foundation for any of it. I suppose if 
I were really doing anything underhand, I should 
be annoyed, but it’s all so obviously silly as it is. 
Don’t you believe in ‘Magna est Veritas’?” and 
he had answered, ‘‘I am not sure about its ‘pre- 
vailing.’ I think scandal does that.” Again her 
ready laugh! ‘‘Well, let it then as long as I have 
the ‘Mens conscia recti.’ Come, you believe in 
that?” 

‘‘Not as much as I believe in your marrying 
me.” And then her voice, quite serious now in its 
softness, 

‘‘Listen, Dudley, I shall never marry. All the 
power of loving I have is centred in my Mother. 
She is everything in the world to me. Beyond her, 
I care for nothing except my Art; I feel I could 
never love any man. Something seems tO' hold 
me from it. Possibly it is the Spirit of my Muse, 
which wants to keep me to herself, working for 
her all my life ! I like men to love me — perhaps 
that is wrong — I don’t know — but I can never 
give them anything In return.” 

Five brilliant years, which had brought her 
more and more of wealth and fame, passed in 


lo OVER LIFE’S EDGE 

swift visions before his mental gaze, years when 
she had been the sunshine of his life to him, the 
inspiration of his pictures, the hourly companion 
of his thoughts, the aim and hope of his future. 

And then lastly came that awful recollection of 
the day he had entered the house of mourning, 
and saw her, the former incarnation of life’s joy, 
as one carved in stone. She was in black. She 
spoke to him quite calmly. In that icy stillness 
and composure, there was something that chilled 
his inner being. 

He tried to console her. She drew him gently 
to the window, then turned and faced the light 
herself. 

“Look In my eyes,” she said merely, and he had 
looked and drawn back In horror. The expression 
in them of die most frightful pain, of an agony 
beyond all expression, met his gaze. 

“Is not the look in them dreadful?” she asked. 
“I cannot face It in the looking-glass myself, I turn 
away from It. Now having seen that Impress, you 
know what I must be suffering. Cease to* talk of 
any consolation, any further life for me, it is over. 
Go away and think of me as one dead,” and so, 
after much futile talk with her, he had been 
obliged to leave her, for his own duty called him. 
The war had just broken out, and with numbers of 
his fellow artists, he was in the first line of those 
who rushed to the colours. Oh, how the horror 
of that never effaceable afternoon swept over 


II 


JOY 

him, when on returning from offering himself for 
the army, he had been slowly walking back to his 
rooms through the dusty, hazy close of a London 
August day, thinking with agonised pity and sor- 
row of her. He could see still in fancy the little 
newsboy as he rushed past him, calling out, 
“Death of a popular authoress.” The gripping 
pain that had rushed through his heart as he had 
heard, transfixed it again now. A few steps fur- 
ther had brought him to a newsagent, and there 
facing him on the board of the contents’ bill, the 
black type standing out alone on the otherwise 
blank white sheet, were the words, “Death of 
Violet Cresswell.” 

As that vision rose before him, the old terrify- 
ing pain they had first stabbed him with, came 
upon him again : intolerable, unsoftened, un-dulled 
by all the horrors of four years of war, and he un- 
closed his eyes, and started up to walk, to out- 
walk — ah, how vain the endeavour ! — the clinging 
misery of his soul. 

He was not insensible of the beauty round him. 
An artist, however deep his grief or any other 
emotion, still always retains a certain conscious- 
ness of the effects of light and atmosphere: he 
can never become wholly blind and deaf to the 
call of beauty. As he walked on, the gentle blue 
of sky and sea, the dancing sunlight, and soft 
caressing air, wooed all his senses. After a time, 
when he had wound his way amongst rocks, and 


12 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


successfully steered round the edges of the dia- 
mond-clear pools, he found himself face to face 
with a more difficult obstacle — one of the great 
rocky ridges that run down from the land far 
into the sea. He paused here, and looked up at 
its steep jagged sides. The gulls wheeled round 
his head, in flashing circles, calling and screaming 
to him in different notes. It seemed as if they 
rather enjoyed the joke of his being arrested in 
his walk. “What will you do now?” they seemed 
to cry to him. “We can fly, we can fly! promon- 
tories are nothing to us! but you, poor human 
crawler on the earth, what will you do? Will 
you climb it, or will you swim round it? Swim, 
swim, swim,” they all seemed to clamour in chorus, 
coming down quite near him, then they all rose 
up, a beautiful shining, whirling pyramid into the 
blue, laughing. For the gull has a note that ex- 
actly resembles the human laugh. A quiet rather 
sardonic little laugh, that is quite startling on a 
lonely beach. It makes you think, when you hear 
it suddenly, that there must be some horrible 
human being near you, the next minute it comes 
again, and you look up to see with relief that it 
is only a glorious white sea bird, sailing majestic- 
ally over your head, and laughing at your In- 
feriority. 

Dudley did not hesitate long. He decided to 
take the gull’s advice : he had put on that morn- 
ing his swimming suit before he had dressed, 
thinking he would take a swim somewhere along 


13 


JOY 

the shore. He undressed now, the gulls continu- 
ing to laugh and scream round him, left all his 
clothes on a high rock, and went down towards 
the sea. 

It was a perfect day, and perfect water for 
swimming, and his mental misery seemed to drop 
from him as he stretched out his limbs, and took 
long easy strokes into the blue. He swam side 
by side with the head land, and then past it some 
distance, then turned and swam back towards the 
shore. As he approached the promontory from 
the sea, he was surprised at the breadth of it at the 
end, and swimming closer he saw there was one of 
those great caverns In it that he had noted In his 
walk. They always interested him deeply, and 
he swam up quickly towards it to explore. When 
he was within about 500 feet of the headland, he 
became aware that shelving rock stretched out 
far from Its foot, and looking down now, through 
the azure clearness of the water, he could see be- 
low him all sorts of points and ridges, and the 
waving of pink and many coloured seaweeds. 
Eddies and currents began to pull and draw upon 
him, and he could realise how lonely and unvisited 
this cavern would always be by reason of the 
dangers set about its approach. Ships and boats 
would give the headland a wide berth fearing the 
hidden rocks about its base. The swimmer on the 
surface was almost equally menaced by the whirl- 
pool draw of the water, especially at the outgoing 
of the tide. 


14 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


Dudley, finding the undertow exhausting him 
more and more, as he neared the cliff, swam out 
and away to the East, then turned and came back 
at a sharp angle to his former course, and nearer 
the shore. He found an easier tract of water here, 
though varying currents pulled and dragged upon 
him as he came close over the hidden reef. 

He was really glad when his feet could touch 
the solid rock, and a few strokes more brought 
him just below the entrance of the cave. He 
stopped swimming, climbed up the rock face, and 
then on dry sand walked into the cavern. 

How very beautiful it was, he thought, looking 
up to the fine curve of the arched roof above him, 
which, in its deep glowing red tints, looked as if 
formed of polished porphyry, ridges of dark 
green, and gleaming white veins of quartz here 
and there added to the appearance of richness, a 
lovely growth of the rare fern asplenium mare- 
num grew over all the highest part, and the whole 
interior sides and roof, drenched with the salt sea 
spray, glistened and gleamed in the wavering 
lights flung into it from the eddying sunlit waters 
without. The floor was quite level, and of the 
finest white and sparkling sand, and round the 
sides, as If carved purposely by nature as seats, 
were Innumerable shelves, and niches, and flat 
slabs of rocks, while almost in the centre stood 
one rock alone, like a huge writing table of a giant, 
or sacrificial altar of some ancient race. Flat- 
topped, and about 1 2 feet long, by ten feet broad. 


JOY 15 

and three feet high, It seemed to complete the fur- 
nishing of the cavern, and suggest it as a dwelling 
place. 

Dudley looked about him with delight, his 
eyes piercing further and further Into the shaded 
recesses of the cave, as they recovered from the 
dazzle of the water, and the sun outside. He 
walked further In towards the very back, and then 
stopped suddenly, for there on one of the flat 
ledges projecting from the side, he saw something 
that resembled a great sea gull. A mass of deli- 
cate grey and snow white feathers rested on the 
rock, and with thoughts of the Albatross in his 
mind, he went forward very gently so as not to 
startle the resting bird. Suddenly with a move- 
ment so quick his eye could not follow it, the mass 
of feathers gathered itself together. There was 
a spring to the ground, and then a human form, 
a woman’s form, stood before him. Bare rosy 
feet on the white sand, a skirt of gulls’ feathers, 
a tunic of gulls’ feathers, bare gleaming arms, 
glinting waves of shining hair, and the face of 
Violet Cresswell looking out at him from the un- 
certain shadows of the cave. 

Dudley almost reeled backward, like a man 
blinded suddenly, but only for an instant, the next, 
the unutterable, the overpowering joy, ran wildly 
through him. She was alive! Clear knowledge 
seemed pouring through him. He was awake, it 
was no dream, no hallucination. It was reality, 
glorious reality. The icy fetters of that awful sor- 


i6 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


row he had been frozen into for four years broke, 
snapped, and fell before him. He rushed for- 
ward with open arms, “Violet,” and the triumph- 
ant cry rang through the cave, and out, over the 
dancing water beyond. A little laugh — Violet’s 
laugh, “Dudley! Just think of our meeting here,” 
and she stretched out one beautiful round arm, 
and rosy hand. He clasped it and back on his 
mind fell another meeting, so like it, yet so widely 
different. A luncheon given by Violet at Clar- 
idge’s, in 'the gay happy years, when neither she 
nor he knew what sorrow was. Just so had she 
met him, just so the poise of the figure and of the 
outstretched hand. Her dress, some fluffy white 
and shimmering stuff, had been similar to this; 
face, eyes, lips curved in a smile, the same. Only 
the details of shoes on the feet, and hair pulled up 
on the head, differed from the picture he saw be- 
fore him now. “Oh, Violet, Violet,” was all he 
could gasp through his suffocating happiness, and 
then he fell on the sand, and kissed her little bare 
feet over and over again in an ecstasy of joy. 

“Don’t be silly, Dudley,” she said laughing. 
“Come down to the mouth of the cave where I can 
see you better,” and she drew her feet away, and 
gave him her hand to raise him from the ground. 
He sprang up and followed her. The lights from 
the sea struck upon every outline of her feather 
dress, and tipped with gold the cloud of hair rest- 
ing on her shoulders. 

When they reached to within some yards of the 


17 


JOY 

entrance she sat down on the soft sparkling sand, 
and motioned to him to do the same. He obeyed, 
wondering how it could all be, but too vibrat- 
ing with intense joy to care. She was alive, alive, 
he saw her, heard her again. Oh, the joy of it. 
It seemed to be breaking his brain in its intensity. 

Violet leant on one lovely white dimpled arm 
and looked up at him. Her eyes seemed to have 
got the blue of the sea in them. They were deeper, 
richer in colour than ever. Her hair shone mar- 
vellously, and was all in close crisp little waving 
lines about her head. Her cheeks glowed with 
transparent pink like the inside of a sea-shell. 

‘‘How’s the war?” she asked. 

“Oh, it’s over.” 

“We won, I suppose?” 

“Yes. We muddled through.” 

“Now, Dudley,” she laughed, her own dear, 
musical laugh, “I expect I must translate that 
into we were splendidly victorious, and you are 
a free artist again, only covered with glory! 
How many medals?” Dudley looked down and 
studied the sand. 

“Only five and some bars, but, Violet ” 

“Yes, I know,” she Interrupted, “I’ll tell you 
about myself in a minute, but first I want to know 
about the medals.” 

“Well, V.C., D.S.O., M.C., 1914 Star, and 
Legion of Honour, and they are all your gifts. 
You see w'hen I heard of your death, I wanted 
to follow you, and I just tried and tried in the 


i8 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


thick of everything, but I couldn’t get killed, I 
only got a V.C. instead.” 

“Good boy,” Violet nodded approvingly. “Well, 
I tried also my best to leave this world, but Death 
wouldn’t have me, but flung me back again to Life, 
and somehow Life without civilisation was not so 
intolerable, and I stopped in it. How does my 
house strike you? Don’t you think it’s beauti- 
ful?” 

“I think it’s glorious,” he answered, following 
her upward glance to the beautiful arched roof 
above them, drenched with the salt spray, and 
glowing rich deep crimson through a net work of 
golden reflections thrown upward from the danc- 
ing water, and from the roof his eyes travelled 
slowly round the brilliantly-coloured, richly-carved 
rock walls, and over the soft white sparkling floor. 

“Seventy yards long by fifty wide; quite a fine 
size, isn’t it?” she asked, “and no such carpet as 
this, nor carving for the walls, nor decorated 
ceiling, in my little Park Lane house, and I don’t 
have to pay £1,500 a year for this. Oh, Dudley, 
you can’t realise what joy and freedom there is In 
a life like this, the absence of all little things, the 
absence of all worries, the absence of that eternal 
dressing, and undressing, and consideration of 
clothes, that is such an Intolerable burden in all 
civilised life. You remember how I always used 
to envy the animal’s life — free from all the curses 
man makes for himself — well, here I am living it, 
and I find I was right. There is more joy in it. 


19 


JOY 

One has the large simple outlines of life, and that 
wonderful sense of being one with all the great 
things. When I swim out here far into the ocean 
and float looking up to the warm blue sky, I seem 
to be part of it, part of its blueness, part of the 
wind sweeping over the water, part of the dancing 
sunlight. I lose myself in contemplation. The 
sea buoys me up, my body Is full of the joyous feel 
of It, and of the joy of motion. The sun and the 
wind caress me, and the gulls scream over me, and 
hour after hour passes while I float and sport like 
this in a flood of mental and physical sensations. 
Then I swim quickly back here, and eat and then 
curl round and sleep warmly and cosily in my 
feather nest up there” — she glanced up to the roof, 
and Dudley’s eyes following hers, saw on a ledge 
close to the roof, a mass of white feathers piled up 
along it — “and when I wake the tide is rising and 
filling the caverns, and the music of It is wonder- 
ful. It’s like a thousand voices singing in the 
greatest and sweetest harmonies you can Imagine, 
so I have my hour or two of Grand Opera, and 
then the tide retreats, and I come down and eat 
again, and then swim out to see the sunset, and 
again I seem to be lifted up to the sky, and to be 
a cloud of gold floating In that glory of colour 
above me. Then later come the moon, and the 
stars, and the crescendo melody of the incoming 
tide. So with my mind and all my senses sated 
with beauty and sweet sound, and joyous motion, 
fatigue gently steals over me, and I draw up the 


20 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


feathers and sleep. It is as I have always thought, 
a wondrous life, full of a perfect calm, no worried, 
wearied brain, no strained eyes, no jangled nerves, 
no heart aching from the cruelty, the ingratitude, 
the treachery of one’s fellow creatures, no brain 
seared by their unkind speeches, no yearning after 
things beyond one’s reach; nothing but melody, 
beauty, and peace.” 

She broke off with a little low laugh, and looked 
up at him. He was sitting gazing on her intently, 
and listening eagerly to her every word. To him 
as an artist, her words conveyed more than they 
would have done to the ordinary man. 

“You see the life here is all in broad outlines, 
drawn in the large curves of huge, sweeping para- 
bolas, as it were. In civilised life, existence is 
drawn in short little lines, like a child’s game of 
oughts and crosses,” she added. 

“Yes, oughts and crosses,” Dudley repeated 
gloomily; “that is existence, as you say, a com- 
bination of oughts, or nothing with crosses, trials, 
tribulations, and vexations.” 

“When I had her with me,” she said in a low 
tone, her eyes filling, “I did not mind the littleness 
of civilised life, for we loved each other so much, 
and a great love gilds and glorifies everything, 
touches everything with splendour, just as the sun 
does in a landscape, but now I am alone, this life 
seems to suit me so much better. Compare my 
day here between the vast expanse of open sea and 
sky, where I am one with the infinite whole, where 


21 


JOY 

I float in these harmonies of colour and motion, 
and sound, with my day in Park Lane — a day full 
of petty little things, even though I used to try to 
keep clear of them, to keep calm and tranquil, and 
in touch with the large things of life. First my 
breakfast came in, in the morning. I hadn’t much 
appetite for it, but I got through it, and then the 
letters ! nearly all worries ! The first my bank 
book returned with only half the right credits 
entered up — laid aside to be written about. Next 
a cover from the publisher for the new book on 
approval, will I approve by return? a vile thing, 
no use at all. Must be sent back. Next an urgent 
letter from my solicitors : one of my copyrights 
has been infringed, and involves me in a loss of 
£5,000. Will I telephone them if they are to act? 
and it would be advisable to see them that morn- 
ing. Next a letter from the theatrical manager: 
he has deleted a speech in my play, and put in some 
comic business of his own, and hopes I will allow 
him to have the same licensed. I read the comic 
business enclosed with horror: absolute refusal 
must be telephoned at once ; and so on. There is 
a pile more, still untouched, but I feel I must leave 
them and get dressed. Oh, that hateful dressing 
— every morning of civilised life. The putting on 
of one thing over the other! Can anything be 
more senseless? Why not one garment and have 
done with it. Well, I dress, crowd on to myself 
twenty-three small bits of clothing. I telephone, 
I write telegrams, and notes, then I telephone to 


22 OVER LIFE’S EDGE 

the hall for a taxi. The answer is, there are none 
for the moment; one may be found. I wait half- 
an-hour, going through the rest of the annoying 
letters. Taxi arrives, and I go to the solicitors; 
the interview is all worry, and I leave with the 
impression that the law has been Invented and 
arranged to protect criminals, and to enable them 
to enjoy their stolen property. I glance up at 
clock, I have some people coming to lunch, fear 
I shall hardly get back in time, hope Paquin will 
have sent the gown I want to wear, and that I 
shall have time to get into It; I arrive back, Paquin 
hasn’t. I telephone. Am assured It will be there 
in five minutes — I wait with a worried uncertainty 
as to whether I had better not change, but wear 
this coat and skirt, which does not suit me. Dress 
arrives; it’s certainly very beautiful. Feel pleased 
as I look at it, but have half-an-hour’s nervous 
tension getting into it, and doing all the catches, 
fastenings, bands, belts, &c. Lovely hat, but can’t 
fix it at the right angle. At last do so, and de- 
scend; note is brought me: the principal person 
for whom the luncheon was arranged is seriously 
ill in bed, and cannot come. The other guests 
that I don’t much care about, arrive; we go into 
lunch ” 

‘‘Now you see,” she broke off, “what have I 
had in that morning? Principally an ever grow- 
ing sense of annoyonce, and irritation, and the day 
goes on the same. There are some nice things 
about, as It were, but they get swamped by such 


JOY 23 

a mass of other things, little things, largely by 
this everlasting dressing/’ 

“Oh, go on, finish your day, I love to hear you^ 
and it brings back all those happy times before the? 
smash came; go on now with your afternoon/’ 
“Well, lunch and coffee and smoke would go 
on to three, then perhaps I’d have a block of time 
at my writing, and, of course, that was happiness, 
with all the world shut out, but then soon there’d 
be a lot of callers, some business, and some social: 
the business ones would bring mostly — worries, 
the social ones would be mostly those I didn’t care 
much about. Then an early dinner, and the Opera. 
The Opera In Itself is divine, but there’s so much 
tiring dressing for it, and then the annoyance of 
the people who won’t get your car or taxi up for 
ages, when you are leaving, and while you’re there 
perhaps the next box to you has people you dis- 
like In It — there’s so much to smother the pleasure 
of it. Then you go to bed with a wearied glad- 
ness to escape from your worried day.” 

Dudley sat watching her, an intense joy in his 
eyes. “All the same, you must come back to that 
life,” he said, “I do want you so much, and while 
I know you are here I shall be so anxious all 
the time.” 

“Why? don’t you think it is nice here?” she 
asked, stretching herself out a little in the hot 
yellow sunshine that turned the fine white sand 
to a golden hue. “Look at it all I what could 
you have more lovely?” 


24 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


It was a beautiful scene, with a hot delicate 
light playing in fairy tracery over the rich red 
walls and roof, and the glorious azure of the danc- 
ing sea in front of them. The blue water whirled 
and swelled deeply round the entrance, throwing 
tiny little wavelets up the shelving bar of sand 
across the cavern’s mouth. The tinkle and the 
murmur lulled the ear. 

“Is it not nice, basking here in the sun?” she 
asked again, smiling at him. Golden light was 
everywhere; it filled the cavern, danced on the 
water, struck on her hair, played in her eyes, and 
all over the soft down of her cheek. 

“This? Yes, this is heaven, of course,” Dudley 
answered. “But then the nights of storm, the days 
of rain, the howling winds ! How can you stand 
the winter here? How can I ever rest again at 
night when there’s a storm, or snow, or wind, 
knowing you are here ?” 

“Well, I have stood it for four and a half years 
now nearly, and I seem all right, don’t I?” 

“Yes, you look glorious, wonderful, but I can’t 
understand it. How have you lived all this time ? 
You talk of eating; what is there to eat, to begin 
with ?” 

“One doesn’t want very much if one is always 
in the open air, the air itself feeds one, this pure 
Atlantic air, but there is plenty to eat. In the 
season for them, I get gulls’ eggs, they don’t mind 
sparing me one, from their nest. Then there are 
oysters, and clams, a few in particular places I 


25 


JOY 

know. The staple food, of course, is the mussel. 
You see the immense masses of those everywhere 
round us, every rock along the coast is blue with 
them; and then there is the laver seaweed. That 
grows everywhere, too, and that’s most nourish- 
ing. Thre are periwinkles too, and lots of little 
fish I know where to find in the clefts of the rock, 
and the pools, which I catch with my hands. I 
hate eating living things, but it is no worse for 
them than when the gulls eat them.” 

“And drink . . . ?” he asked. 

“Water, fresh water. There are basins and 
bowls, and indentations everywhere, in the rocks, 
and some of them are always full.” 

“But don’t you want tea or coffee; don’t you 
long for them?” 

Violet smiled, looking back at him through the 
shimmering light. “Dudley,” she said after a 
minute, “it’s very difficult for you to understand, 
because we have got onto different planes of life. 
You know in mathematics, how each problem 
must be worked out on its own plane, and how 
impossible it is to make it clear otherwise. Well, 
you are on one plane now, and I am on another, 
and there is a gulf between which no speech can 
wholly bridge. You are in Life. I am outside It. 
I am over Life’s Edge, on a plane where tea and 
coffee, food, wine, warm beds, fires, lights, a roof 
over one’s head, and companionship of silly chat- 
tering human beings, all that seems so nice, and 
so necessary In life, has no call in It, no attraction. 


26 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


no allure. I liked all those things once, when I 
was in Life, where you are now, but when you 
have passed through Death, when you have wan- 
dered in the Valley of the Shadow, as I have done; 
when you have been gripped and smashed, in the 
clutch of an appalling grief, as a little boat is be- 
tween two icebergs, then these things are nothing 
to you. Something so great, so awful, has come 
up to you, and struck you, that nothing little can 
hardly be recognised by you again. Lamplight 
and firelight cannot cheer you, your soul turns 
away to the vast open starlight. The warm in- 
terior of the protective house, means no longer 
protection to you since Death entered there, and 
the blackness, the bitter howling of the tempest, 
the roar and icy cold of the winter storm, equally 
seem nothing to you, for you have known Death, 
which is much blacker and colder and more horror- 
filling than they are. I have been through it, dear 
Dudley,” she added gently, “and I know it Is so. 
When I was In Life, I liked, as you like, as every 
normal person likes, warmth and bright rooms, 
and light and cheerfulness; I disliked cold and 
storm and darkness, and anything that was de- 
pressing. And viewed against my bright happy 
existence, my golden life, dark nights, cold mists, 
black raging seas, were depressing, but since that 
week when I lay with her, all that I ever loved, 
dead in my arms, and Death folded us both over 
with his dark wings, shutting out all view of life 
from me, and after I had come down here, and 


27 


JOY 

in that black night of storm, thrown myself into 
that raging black sea, and thought that Death 
was enfolding me finally, since then I am entirely 
different; I am not dead, but I am outside little 
light gay human life altogether.” 

Dudley listened to her with his face set and 
white, and growing anxious. Tears stood in his 
eyes. 

‘‘Don’t,” he said, “don’t talk like this. I know. 
I know how much you have suffered, but don’t say 
we are divided for ever, just when I’ve found you 
again. Oh, if you knew the joy it is to me to see 
you actually alive, the wonderful joy just to touch 
your hand, you wouldn’t spoil it all by this dread- 
ful talk. You will come back to life, you must 
get onto my plane again. I love you so. I want 
you back in life, in those warm interiors, under 
those ^protective roofs, in the lamplight, and the 
firelight, and the laughter. You are my Eurydice, 
I must lead you out of all this blackness.” 

“But you remember Orpheus couldn’t and 
didn’t,” she said with a little soft laugh. “He 
failed and Eurydice was left in Hades.” 

An irresistible chill crept over Dudley. Al- 
though she looked and spoke and laughed as in 
former days, although even that frightful look of 
pain had died out of her eyes, perhaps, perhaps 
some vital chord had snapped within her, per- 
haps he never would be able to get her back. 
If she made up her mind that she would not come, 


28 OVER LIFE’S EDGE 

he knew he would not be able to prevail against 
her. 

How well he remembered that soft obstinaqr of 
hers, that formerly had made her deaf to his en- 
treaties, and had been the wonder of her many 
would-be lovers, to whom she was kind just so far 
as the conventions of the world permitted and no 
further. Not one shade more than that. And he 
knew how she, the writer of love, and with hot 
invented scandals flying about her name, really 
lived in the coldest austerity, a marble statue of 
Diana in a solitary glade, just because the passions 
of men, as she now said of Life, had no charm and 
no allure for her. Nothing had been able to induce 
her to accept lover or husband formerly. Nothing 
now perhaps would induce her to re-accept Life. 

“Life here Is so intensely beautiful, as I have 
said, that It consoles and soothes me a little. The 
starry nights, for instance, when I lie gently float- 
ing, looking up to the sky. The whole dome above 
me Is ablaze with glorious palpitating light, and 
somehow one gets to feel one Is a part of it. I 
feel that I am one with beauty and eternity and 
limitless space, and all large and boundless things.” 

There was silence for a moment between them, 
broken only by the swell and lap of the water, the 
voice of the incoming tide. A sense of the peace 
and tranquility of such a life, a sense of grandness 
and remoteness, came over Dudley. Was it fair, 
was it wise, to tempt back, even If he could, any 


JOY 29 

soul who had thus escaped the prison house of 
petty existence, back to It again? 

But then swiftly following this thought, came 
the rush of human, personal, purely selfish emo- 
tion. He wanted her so much, wanted to see her, 
be with her, hear her voice, and he couldn’t live 
always in a cavern. He must get her out, make 
her human again. Petty and small she never 
would be, as she had never been before. Aloud 
he said : “But if, for instance, you came back to 
ordinary life and we travelled together, think of 
what we could see, all the starry skies you like, 
and snow mountains, and glorious rolling seas, and 
palmed-fringed beaches, and sunrises and sunsets, 
and all the beauty of the world. There is no 
need to go back to Park Lane, or Grosvenor 
Square, or luncheon parties, or anything small and 
tiresome, and beastly. Now is there?” 

She seemed a little influenced by that, he 
thought. She lay silent, gazing upward, and fol- 
lowing her eyes to the arched roof above them, 
he saw that her gaze rested on a beautiful vein 
of rich turquoise blue mineral that ran through 
the centre of the claret and burgundy tints of the 
rock. It was a very vivid colour of a pure brilliant 
tone, and he thought It must be a vein of Azurlte. 

“The Grotto Azurro at Capri is quite as blue,” 
he remarked after a minute. 

She laughed at that, and rolled over onto her 
chest, driving her elbows deep Into the soft sand, 
and supporting her chin In her hands. She looked 


30 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


up at him, and the blue in her eyes seemed brighter 
than the azurlte above them. 

“Come to the Island of Capri with me, and 
we’ll float about in a little boat on the bay of 
Naples.” 

Wildly his heart beat, as he waited for her 
answer. London, Grosvenor Square, the life he 
had bound himself Into, all seemed very far away. 
After all, for some natures, it is not exterior cir- 
cumstances which make up life, it is the Inner 
Existence of the Soul : the world of thought, ideas, 
memories, and emotions. For four years all this 
had been In ruins. His heart and brain had lain 
numb in an icy blackness of despair. Now sud- 
denly the sun had burst out, and all that inner 
world was re-lit with flaming gold. 

Somehow he would, at all costs, preserve that 
life-giving light. The joy of knowing her alive 
was so over-powering, so all-absorbing, that he 
could not hesitate to accept It, any more than a 
blind man In his anguished darkness, could hesitate 
to accept the gift of sight. “Somehow,” he 
thought madly to himself, “somehow he would 
arrange to get free.” For the moment at least he 
pushed the thought of all difficulties, all Impedi- 
ments, away from him. Fate had stretched out 
an Infinite relief to him, a joy, a blessing, beyond 
all measurement. Was he to cavil at it? to ques- 
tion It? No, whatever the price, he would take it. 

“Ah, If I were on the same plane of life as you 
are,” she said softly, gently, with a sighing voice, 


31 


JOY 

^‘the plane of eager desires, and little wishes, the 
plane where one goes in trains, and steamboats, 
takes tickets, and wears hats and boots, it might 
be different, but as it is, I am one with the elements, 
I am part of the great Atlantic.” 

“Fiddlesticks! I won’t believe it! or if you 
are, I don’t care. The Atlantic shan’t have you. 
I have come to claim you from it.” 

“It has been very good to me,” murmured the 
girl. “Oh, If you knew what a night of horror 
that was when I came down from London to New- 
quay by train. It was dark when I reached the 
station, and I started out alone In that roaring 
storm to walk along the cliffs. There was dark- 
ness everyw'here, darkness, and tremendous sound. 
The roar of the waves, the thunder of the caverns 
as the rocks were struck, the howl of the wind, 
and the cry of that rain — ^you talk of storm — 
after a walk like that, no storm could seem much 
to me again.” She paused: her eyes were shad- 
owed, and far away. 

Dudley leant closer to her. 

“Well, go on. What happened?” 

“I walked for ever it seemed along the cliffs’ 
edge, and at last I seemed to be at the highest 
point. I went to the very edge, and below me, 
far, far down In the blackness, I could see all was 
seething, raging white. I was blinded and stung 
by the rain, deafened by the wash of the sea 
against the cliff, and the bellowing of the wind. 
I was very, very tired, with the long struggle over 


32 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


the rough, uneven ground. My only feeling left, 
was a sense of thankfulness that I had reached 
the trysting place with Death. I stepped forward 
over the edge, into the black and shrieking void, 
felt myself fall, and then the swirling whiteness 
met me. There was a terrific feeling of shock, 
of intense cold, and then nothing, nothing more. 
That I thought was Death and I went into its 
dark portal with delight.” 

“Thank God it wasn’t,” breathed Dudley; “go 
on, what happened?” 

“I don’t know exactly, but I’ll tell you what I 
think presently. The next thing that I was 
conscious of I was waking with the sun very hot on 
my face, and opening my eyes, I looked straight 
up into a perfect deep blue sky. Over me hun- 
dreds of gulls were wheeling, with their shining 
grey-blue wings, and I heard the notes of a lark. 
I sat up. I felt no pain. I was quite dry, and 
warm, and the sun was delicious. I looked round 
me and saw I was on a projecting ledge of rock 
jutting out from the side of the cliff, which ran 
up a hundred feet or so above me. I could see 
the overhanging cornice of the edge with its tufts 
of grass, and flowers, and its rabbit holes just 
beneath the top. Below me the cliff descended 
ruggedly uneven, but nearly straight, to a little 
bay of shining sand. Fringing this were bands of 
rocks of every size, rocks and pools, then beyond 
great plains of sand, and far, far out In the dis- 
tance, the calm and tranquil sea, its tiny waves 


hardly strong enough to curl over at its edge. 
The peace, the warmth, the sweet smell of the 
grasses on the land, the heavenly blue above, and 
the joyous circling birds filled me with a sort of 
responsive happiness. 

“I was alive, and surprised to be so, but the wish 
for Death had dropped from me for the time. I 
felt hungry, and a simple instinctive desire to find 
food to live ; I gazed down ; there seemed plenty 
of small niches, footholds, and projections In the 
cliff face, and as I looked I saw below me on the 
sand, a number of gulls together. They were tear- 
ing the mussels from a flat rock, and breaking, and 
eating them. This decided me; I would climb 
down to the shore below. I stood up on my shelf, 
and found I was quite unhurt. I suppose that 
night the seething water that swelled in great 
masses, rather than waves against the cliff in that 
deep bay, had lifted me up on its surface, flung me 
onto the ledge, and left me there. Perhaps It was 
the turn of the tide, when I had jumped, the last 
high swell had put me there, and after that the tide 
had sunk, going lower and lower, and the water 
had not reached me again. At any rate, there I 
was, in the little serge dress I had been wearing, 
my hat was gone, and my hair was all down and 
loose. I twisted it tight round my head, and tied 
it, that it might not get In my way. Then very 
slowly, and cautiously, I clambered down, holding 
on with my hands and finding footholds anywhere 
I could. The gulls were sitting about all over the 


34 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


face of the cliffs, and their white bodies perched 
on the widest resting places, often showed me the 
best foothold or handhold. I reached the floor of 
the sandy cove at last, and the gulls which were 
feeding there flew away, leaving the scattered 
shells of the mussels and periwinkles behind them. 
I took some from the same rock as they had, and 
ate quite a number. Then I looked all along the 
shore ; it stretched for miles, and miles, down the 
coast, each way, and I could not see a single human 
being. Only the beautiful gulls, the choughs, some 
ducks, and the sunshine and breeze seemed there. 
I lay down on the hot sandy strand, and thought. 
It was all so quiet, so golden and the pools between 
the rocks lay like jewels in front of me. It was 
so calm and tranquilising after all I had suffered. 
I had gone through the door of Death, and said 
good-bye to the world. I had no more wish for 
Death just then. I thought if Fate allowed it, I 
would stay and live with the gulls, and I’ve lived 
with them ever since.” 

Dudley drew in his breath which he had held 
almost suspended as she talked. 

“It’s all quite wonderful,” he said. “I should 
not have believed it possible.” 

“It’s just one of those things you could not do 
If you planned It, or wished it,” she answered. 
“I expected daily at first to get pneumonia, or 
gastritis, o-r both, from the exposure, and the 
different food, but just, I suppose, because I was 


JOY 35 

willing to go, expected to go at any minute, Fate 
has let me live on.” 

‘Tate was keeping you for me. I’m sure she 
was.” Violet smiled, but did not argue the point. 

“After I had rested a little that afternoon, I got 
up and walked along, and when I came to this 
promontory that jutted out Into the sea, I clam- 
bered along its side as far as I could. Then I 
watched the current swirling round its point, and 
I saw it would be too dangerous for any ordinary 
swimmer to care to attempt, and that any cave, 
if there were one, at the end, would be quite safe 
from all visits by man. I let myself down into 
the water, and swam round with great care, and 
to my joy found this. There are hundreds of 
caverns all along the coast, and in every promon- 
tory, but this is a specially good one for me. It’s 
so very difficult of access and quite invisible from 
the shore.” 

“It Is a lovely place, and the life is quite won- 
derful, beautiful. I can understand all that,” he 
answered. “But you’ve had It for four years now. 
I think that’s enough, and there are heaps of 
places as lovely all over the world, and lots to do, 
to see, and enjoy. You must come with me, and 
we’ll do all that together. With all the beauty 
of the life here. It must be monotonous.” 

“Of course it Is,” she answered. “But some- 
how I am not conscious of the sameness, any more 
than the sea feels the monotony of Its eternal 
coming up and going down.” 


36 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


There was silence for a moment, then Dudley 
said, “I like your dress Immensely. How did you 
make it?” 

“It’s quite easy; I collect all the gulls’ feathers 
I can find — pick them up whenever I see them ; so 
I have quite a store now, after four years. When 
I want a dress, I take the best of them, drill a hole 
through the quill root, with a pointed stick, then 
string them on a long narrow piece of that tough 
seaweed one finds here, and tie that round my 
waist. From this belt hang long vertical lines of 
seaweed, which support a second string of feath- 
ers. Two rows are generally enough for a skirt, 
as you see. Then I take shorter feathers, string 
them in the same way and tie the top string round 
my neck, and the second string round the ribs. 
That makes the bodice. My first attempts were 
very clumsy, but I’ve Improved. I string the 
feathers very thickly now, making them all over- 
lap, and I arrange them so that the colours form 
an even pattern.” 

“It’s very cleverly done, and so pretty and 
soft,” he said, stroking gently her feathered 
shoulder; “and you’ve got your own dress still, 
I suppose?” 

“Yes; everything I was wearing, boots and all. 
It’s put away upstairs In a chink in the rock. And 
I had some money, in a pocket with a buttoned- 
down flap Inside my coat, and a little case with a 
mirror and comb, and pair of scissors. It’s all 


JOY 37 

there, the sea robbed me of nothing except my 
hat.” 

“I am glad,” murmured Dudley. ‘‘It is an 
omen : it means you will come back.” 

Violet did not reply. She only shook her head. 
Her eyes were fixed on the bright blue distance 
beyond the cavern. “Look now,” she said after 
a minute, “the tide is nearly up. See the water 
coming in?” Dudley’s eyes followed hers: the 
blue had swelled up to the lip of the cave, and 
now sparkling ripples of it flowed in and spread 
themselves out In shining flats on the sandy floor: 
then with a little tinkling laughing murmur they 
slid back and fell over the rock threshold with a 
gurgle into the blue again. 

“At high tide the whole of the cavern except 
just at the back there has its floor covered to 
about two Inches in depth, and, of course. In rough 
and very high tides, a good deal more,” she added. 
“You have got warm and dry basking there in 
the sun, you don’t want to get into the water 
again, do you ? We will climb up on the table and 
get out of its way.” 

They got up and perched themselves on the 
great centre rock, and from this point Dudley 
could see far out Into the glorious wealth of colour, 
deepening and Intensifying as the day reached Its 
zenith. The sea calm on the surface, rocked and 
swelled and heaved with Its own ever buoyant 
palpitating motion. It was now a beautiful even 
tone of softest green, and over the surface lay 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


38 

dark blue patches, the shadows of the white light- 
filled clouds sailing over it. The sky was of the 
luminous ethereal blue of early summer. Dudley’s 
eyes drank it all in, as a man drinks wine, and 
watched fascinated, the laughing golden water 
stealing into the cavern, bringing with it fresh 
fairy lights, and throwing them in various patterns 
on the roof and walls. 

“Oh, Violet, darling, this is lovely,” he ex- 
claimed sitting very close to her on the rock, “and 
I am so happy in finding you again; I shall never 
want to leave you. If you won’t come back to 
Life, why shouldn’t we live together here? We 
could make the cavern quite comfortable. Let 
me get a stove, and lots of provisions and every- 
thing we want, and bring them all round in a boat. 
At high tide it would be quite easy.” 

He stopped, for Violet had turned her head, and 
was now regarding him with amazed amusement. 

“Dudley! what an idea! Stoves! and pro- 
visions ! No. Don’t you see if you once get all 
that into your life, you drag into it again all the 
troubles and worries and pettiness that I have 
escaped from? That would be just ordinary camp- 
ing with all its tiresomeness and limitations. A 
stove means cooking, cooking means smoke and 
dirt, and those mean cleaning. Provisions mean 
going and buying them, coming Into contact with 
shops and your fellow creatures ; It would all bring 
petty doing, petty worrying about small things. 
Then any provisions mean safeguarding them, and 


39 


JOY 

a boat coming here would mean being observed, 
followed, probably attacked, possibly robbed or 
murdered. Don’t you see my life here Is like an 
animal’s? I feed and live at the hand of the 
Creator, as the animals do, hence the freedom, 
the feeling of mixing, and being one with the ele- 
ments. If you are once to tamper with It and 
Introduce any of the stupid paraphernalia of 
human life then it Is better to have all that clvlllsa- 
tion can give, the very highest, as you may say 
we have In London, the very ultra refinement of 
artificiality. But the Intermediate stages, the sor- 
did caring for the bodily needs In an ordinary 
sordid human way: that, I think, is absolutely 
soul-killing.” 

Dudley laughed. 

“You have completely crushed me. Of course,, 
I see what you mean, but I want youy you, you. 
I don’t want ever to leave you again, and how I 
can stay here and live in these conditions, I don’t 
see.” 

“I don’t want you to. I want you to go back 
and live your own life in the world.” 

“My own life?” 

Dudley’s face suddenly clouded, his eyes grew 
black and somibre. He looked away from the girl 
over the merry sun-and-shadow-flecked sea. He 
sank his ohin on his hand, and stared straight 
before him In silence. He seemed to have fallen 
Into some gloomy reverie. The girl also relapsed 
into silence, and so they sat, close together on the 


40 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


rock, almost touching, but their minds travelling 
different ways, and the water came into the cavern 
sportively, like a living thing, and played about on 
the sand all round the rock they were sitting on. 

He stayed In the cavern all day with her, revel- 
ling In the happiness of having found her again, 
and all his artistic senses fed and satisfied by the 
ever-varying beauty of the sea, and the glory of 
light and colour. Inside and out, of the cave. 

Through all that long golden day, at no time 
was any effect stationary. It was one gorgeous 
moving pageant, an ordered procession of beauti- 
ful shades of colour, of wonderful degrees of light 
and shadow, of brilliance and softness, following 
each other, sometimes distinct, sometimes blend- 
ing with each other to give rise to new harmonies. 

At one time, the sea would be of the most vivid 
peacock green, with bands In it of deepest ultra- 
marine, arched over by a sky of blue. Then the 
light-filled clouds would float up to the zenith, and 
the dome above become of a golden white, while 
the water changed to the fairest azure; again, as 
the little clouds broke and dispersed, tossed aside 
by the light zephyrs, under the free hot glare of 
the sun, the sea became deep radiant sapphire, 
sparkling and glittering in all Its myriad ripples. 

Through the day they talked : not so much upon 
personal matters, for there was a great black hole 
torn In both their lives, the edges of which were 
too sore to bear touching. She could not speak 
of her horrible mental suffering, of a grief that 


41 


JOY 

could find no adequate expression in words; he 
could not dwell on those four years of war, with 
all their visions of shuddering pain. But as always 
their talk strayed Into wide fields distant from 
themselves. All their lives they had been together 
so much, and they were so alike in their tastes and 
opinions, it was sheer joy to bandy words together, 
to call up sweet happy memories from the sunlit 
days of the past, to exchange recollections of the 
glorious countries they had visited, to recall the 
adventures, the fun they had shared, to discuss 
again their early work and struggles, and all their 
later triumphs in their sister arts. All the years 
before 1914 their thoughts and talk skimmed over, 
darting about here and there, visiting spots of 
beauty and interest, like pleasure boats on a bright 
and sunlit sea. And like a grim rock in the fore- 
ground which they never approached, rose the 
year, 1914, a rock of shipwreck and disaster. In 
the glint and sparkle of such talk, the minutes 
danced by unnoticed. In the cavern Time had no 
existence, or rather it flowed harmlessly over one. 
Fixtures, things-to-do, and duties, were not con- 
tinually springing out of It, and clutching one by 
the throat. Even the slavery of meal times was 
not there. When they got hungry they turned to 
the ledges where the mussels grew, and ate till they 
were satisfied. As the sun rays travelled round 
and heated the air, they withdrew to the shade 
at the back of the dwelling. Even In the noon- 


42 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


tide warmth, they dozed a little, lying side by 
side on the dry sand. 

Then towards evening, when the rich velvety 
crimson of the cavern walls began to blaze with 
the in-thrown glory of the sunset fires, they came 
to the threshold, and sat there looking out upon 
the glowing gently-pulsating sea. 

An exquisite calm seemed to fall upon them both. 
All the suffering and agony of human life in which 
they had both been wrapped, seemed to fall from 
them, as a mantle slips from the shoulders. They 
lost themselves in contemplation of the divine 
beauty of sea and sky, and sat there voiceless, 
motionless, gazing. Before them, out to the far 
horizon, stretched the smoothly-undulating ocean, 
oil-like on the surface, yet with ripple ever follow- 
ing ripple, and each of these, pale green above, and 
clear transparent purple in its under curve, gave 
the whole moving plain a rainbow tint of mauve. 
Above, the sky was of a deep mysterious rose, 
across which came lightly-floating little clouds, like 
golden feathers; away to the East the five islands 
lifted themselves in dark violet against the dis- 
tance, and over all like a divine benediction hung 
the glory of rich topaz-coloured light. Light so 
transparent, so exquisitely crystalline, that each 
object seen through its medium, seemed to acquire 
extra roundness and beauty. 

Dudley put his arm softly round her shoulders, 
as they sat side by side, and the glamour and en- 
chantment of the scene, and the movement, was 


43 


JOY 

such that she did not draw away. She felt the 
great happiness in him that vibrated through every 
atom of his being, and she would not mar it. She 
also had known what it was to feel happy, and 
have the enthusiasm of joy, the wine of life run- 
ning in her veins, and something In the mellow 
softness of the golden atmosphere in the melting 
loveliness of the serene and rose-hued sky, spoke 
to her, and urged her not to be harsh to him. She 
looked up at him and smiled, and suddenly all the 
beauty and glory round them seemed to the man 
to grow more Intense. He looked into those eyes, 
where all the radiance of sea and sky seemed to 
concentrate. Then he bent down, and kissed her. 

Ah, to kiss once more, lips that one has thought 
lost to one for ever! the joy of it Is beyond the 
power of any words to express, as Is the unutter- 
able agony that follows eternal separation. The 
embrace was only for a moment, for he felt her 
move restlessly in It, and she was so dear, and so 
sacred, to him, that he would not hold her captive 
against her will. 

“A good-night kiss,” she said gently, releasing 
herself; ‘‘I want you to go now, Dudley, while 
the sunset lights you home.” 

“I hate to go. I have been so wildly happy here 
all day. After four years! one happy day, and 
yet it has had power to almost obliterate them all ! 
Let me stay a little longer.” 

“No, I want you to go before the dark, and get 


44 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


home early enough to eat and sleep well. You 
can come again to-morrow.” 

“To-morrow! Who knows if it will be fair 
weather,” he answered, quoting a little Greek 
phrase familiar to them both: “I count my life 
now only in present minutes. I mistrust the one 
ahead of me.” 

In the bright air, a flock of ducks flew by, in 
strong, steady, wedge-shaped flight. They passed 
so near the human figures, that the green and 
bronze of their plumage was quite visible as they 
went by. 

“They are going to rest,” she said, following 
with her eyes their brilliant rapid winging to the 
West, “and I must rest too. So much emotion, 
so much talking, after years of tranquil silence, 
has tired me out.” 

“Rest and sleep in my arms,” he answered, hold- 
ing them out to her. 

“I promise I will watch over you, and protect 
you, and not move once to break in upon your 
dreams.” 

She looked back at him. Very handsome in 
that eager attitude he looked; beautiful in feat- 
ure and straight and tall, framed, in the glori- 
ous yellow light, full of all the grace and strength 
and symmetry and charm of youth and life; but 
that something that makes love leap to love, and 
human heart long to beat on fellow human heart, 
had snapped and perished within her, and her 
lonely rocky shelf, and the quiet of the cavern. 


45 


JOY 

appealed to her more than his outstretched arms. 
For little wounds, and little miseries in the old 
past days, they might have consoled her. They 
could not reach her now across the immeasurable 
gulf of grief over which she had travelled. 

More than ever in that moment, when they 
stood facing each other, the vivid light irradiating 
them both, she realised how far she had slipped 
away from the world, how little its joys, its loves, 
meant to her now, as little almost as any of Its 
material possessions. 

She would not sadden him by pressing home this 
to his consciousness. He looked so happy in his 
new-found hope and joy she would not destroy 
the glittering toys. She drew back, and shook 
her head, but her smile was bright upon him, 
and her voice soft and gentle as she said, 

“No. It must be good-bye till to-morrow, or 
any to-morrow that you like to come.” Very 
reluctantly he left her, but he did so for deep 
down in his heart lurked a fear that any persist- 
ence on his part in the face of her wishes, would 
result In her escaping from him altogether, and if 
she chose to hide in any of the countless caverns 
down this rugged coast, he would have no hope 
of finding her. 

No, he saw clearly enough, he must somehow 
create a desire in her for his presence, to force his 
presence on her undesired would be disastrous. 

He passed over the threshold, and she saw him 
stand for a moment, a beautiful silhouette against 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


46 

the deep luminous pink of the sky, then he was 
gone, and she heard the sound — it could hardly 
be called a splash — of his plunge into the water. 
She went to the edge of the cave and leaned for- 
ward. He was already swimming away through 
the oily-surfaced, bright-hued water, and the rip- 
ples were breaking into shining circles round his 
neck. She waved her hand to him, and he lifted 
one arm and gave her a military salute from the 
water, and the drops fell from his raised elbow like 
a string of rubies. 

For a long time she stood there gazing after 
him through the dream of lovely colour, then when 
she could no longer see the black head, nor the 
sparkle of widening circles round it, she withdrew, 
into the vast and shadowy interior of the cavern. 

Dudley successfully rounded the dangerous cur- 
rent, and swam on tranquilly till he was opposite 
the spot where he had left his clothes. Here he 
landed, and walked up the lonely and deserted 
heach, dressed, by the gorgeous light of the sunset, 
and then started his walk home along the sands. 

The tide was low, as it had been that morning, 
but nothing else seemed the same, least of all the 
man who walked there. The wet strand rolled 
before him, literally flaming with colour, for it 
mirrored faithfully the sky above, and as the 
clouds of all shapes and sizes caught fire in the 
sunset and turned to crimson and purple overhead, 
so they floated beneath his feet reflected by the 
gleaming sands. He was walking In a magic 


47 


JOY 

world indeed. A world of royal colour and am- 
ber light. He hardly seemed to himself to touch 
the ground. He was conscious of no fatigue, 
hardly of the effort of motion. It seemed to him 
he was borne along by the sheer pressure of the 
joy and elation within him: he seemed passing 
without conscious volition between two skies, for 
all before him was masses of crimson cloud, or 
great gulfs of rosy space, and the tiny golden 
clouds that floated as feathers In the sky became 
little sailing skiffs in the shining mirage of the 
sands. 

Very slowly, imperceptibly, as he walked, the 
glory about him changed, the light lessened, and 
weakened, and a soft violet twilight drew round 
him. The stars, only faintly silver, began to show 
here and there. A full moon, as yet but a pale 
transparent disc, rose in the East behind him. 

Inside his brain was a chaos, but a happy glow- 
ing chaos, caused by one set of glad triumphant 
thoughts crowding in upon, and jostling others 
quite as confident and joyful. 

Pictures of the girl In every kind of circum- 
stance and surrounding which he would like for 
her, passed before him. Violet, re-installed in her 
house that stood waiting for her; Violet having 
refused her house. In a little flat, cosy, luxurious, 
that he had chosen for her; Violet, mistress of his 
so-called shooting box, but In reality his painting 
studio. In Scotland, on the edge of Loch Morar; 
Violet, wrapped In rose-coloured velvet and white 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


48 

fur, driving with him to the opera; Violet, lunch- 
ing with him at Claridges, in a warm oak-panelled 
corner, which they had known well in the old 
happy days; Violet, in a close-drawn fur cap and 
leather suit, side by side with him in a flying plane, 
skimming through infinite space, over the Indian 
Ocean. Gaily the pictures jostled and jumbled 
together, in the bright light of his rejoicing brain, 
and with a man’s usual unthinking egoism, amongst 
all the visions of surroundings that he wished for 
her, hardly one came of the surrounding she 
wished for herself — ^the vast peace of her lonely 
cavern filled with the unending melody of the 
ocean. 

He reached Newquay and went up the steps cut 
In the cliff that led him straight home. 

His rooms were, in his opinion, the best in the 
whole place. There is a portion of the top of the 
cliff which is called the Island Estate. On this, 
facing the immeasurable plain of the Atlantic, 
stands a short terrace of red brick houses: broad, 
with wide bow windows, and graceful light bal- 
conies. They had by their warm colour, and 
pleasing lines, attracted Dudley’s artistic eye, and 
reading the name Waverly House upon one, the 
sound of which pleased his ear, and noting it was 
the one of the whole terrace that stood nearest the 
cliff edge — only fifteen paces indeed away from it 
— he had gone inside, and asked for rooms. When 
Mr. and Mrs. Butler, the happy owners of this 
house, had shown him into the drawing-room, the 


49 


JOY 

restfulness and comfort of its size, its lines and 
proportions, crowned by the exquisite picture be- 
fore the window, the view of that immense blue- 
ness, that seemed atcually to enter the room, and 
be part of it, all this had laid hands upon him as 
it were, and held him still. 

It had been a gorgeous afternoon, just merging 
Into evening, and a rich pinkish golden sunlight 
was thrown Into the room from the West: It fell 
upon a deep blue vase standing In one corner, that 
supported a plant of long trailing tendrils. The 
slender and beautiful grace of Its outline, the won- 
drous depths of colour In the bowl had won for It 
a prize at a Paris Exhibition. Dudley’s eye fell 
upon it, illumined by the sun rays, and like the rest 
of the room, it said to him, “Stay.” 

He had stepped out through a glass door, beside 
the wide bow window on to the balcony. It was 
high tide : the Atlantic, In all its glory was rushing 
in, and the whole of the broad bay, from the foot 
of the cliff here, where It dashed itself Into seeth- 
ing white, across to the opposite side, where the 
harbour nestled under the cliffs, was one stretch of 
vivid tumbling rollicking blue. The sunshine 
danced over it and little skifts of white crested 
the great clear proudly-arched billows as they came 
rolling In with the force of three thousand miles 
of sea behind them. 

Dudley had gazed over the scene, and drawn in 
the life-giving breath of the ocean with delight. 
Just opposite the house stood the small island. 


50 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


from which this estate takes its name. It was 
wholly an island now at high tide, and it made 
an object of beauty in the bay, for the water broke 
all round its base, in such a glorious rushing to- 
gether of blues and greens, and surge of snowy 
spray and foam. 

To see it bounding through the narrow channel, 
between the island, and the side of the mainland, 
and spreading itself out in a beautiful fan on the 
beach, was a joy to the eye. He had leaned his 
arms on the balcony, looking down. There was a 
pyramid of rock about 20 feet in height, not far 
from the island, between it and the cliff on which 
the house stood, and round and round this rock, 
in everlasting drcles, eddied and played the water, 
now deep green, now a most lustrous blue, enclos- 
ing It, embracing it, foaming over It — and devour- 
ing It! This rock, in the arms of the beautiful, 
sparkling, treacherous waves, was just below the 
window, and he had gazed down on It lost in 
thought. How many thousands of years would 
pass over, he wondered, before those terrible 
caresses accomplished their end, and the rock, re- 
duced to sand, slept under the rentless, restless 
tide. 

A voice behind him had roused him. “Did he 
like the rooms? Would he take them?” and he 
had answered “Yes,” without hesitation. Where 
could war-wearied eyes rest better than on that 
grand, 'tumultuous, heaving riot of green-blue 
water, rushing impetuously through narrow chan- 


JOY 51 

nel, and round opposing island to embrace in its 
foam-white arms, the fated rock? 

Now on this evening, coming back in the sunset, 
the tide was low, and the island, instead of being 
encircled with swaying heaving water, and musical 
up-lapping little waves, rested serenely on a plain 
of firm dry sand, as smooth as golden marble. 

The steps cut in the cliff were dry, the tide that 
with the dawn would be beating against them, was 
now far away, doubtless intent on other matters, 
and he went lightly up them, crossed a few paces 
of turf on the top of the cliff, and reached his 
rooms. 

He had taken the whole house. He had come 
before the season, early in the year, while the place 
was still delightfully peaceful and quiet, and the 
house happening to be vacant, he had taken it, 
feeling in that way he would really obtain the rest 
and calm his tired, nerve-weary, heart-sick state 
required. 

He went into the dining-room now and ate his 
dinner, solitary indeed, but not lonely any longer; 
Joy Is a great companion. Singing thoughts, racing 
heart beats, leaping pulses, and glowing brain, 
these are company enough for any man. The 
dinner was excellent, and perfectly cooked, but he 
could hardly have told you what It was, so little 
did such things seem to matter in comparison with 
his day’s discovery. When he had finished he 
lighted a cigarette, and rang the bell. “Mr. 
Butler,” he said when his landlord appeared, “will 


52 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


you let me have Scamp for a few minutes in the 
drawing-room?” He went on up the stairs, and 
after a moment, scurrying feet came along the 
hall, and a snow-white fox terrier, with a golden 
tan head, caught him up on the first landing, and 
bounded into his out-stretched arms. Scamp was 
not his dog. He belonged to the Butlers, but he 
was of that sweet and engaging disposition, that 
while his whole heart was devoted to his owners, 
he still had affection to spare for anyone who tried 
to win it, and Dudley with his enthusiasm for the 
beauty of animals, had been captivated at once by 
his attractiveness. There are dogs, and dogs. 
All dogs are good and deserving of our deepest 
consideration. There are no bad dogs. But there 
are varying degrees among them of beauty and 
charm. Scamp was the ideal fox terrier; perfect 
in line, and contour, and shape, in glossy satin skin, 
and in gay enthusiastic disposition. When Dudley 
carried him into the drawing-room and set him 
down, he seemed to clearly realise the happy mood 
the man was in. He leaped, he barked, he tumbled, 
he lay down with his ears put back, stock still for a 
moment, then bounded up and rushed all round the 
room, and back to Dudley’s feet, to stand looking 
up at him, and wagging his short tail. “I know ! 
I know how jolly you are ! Here goes for just one 
more gallop round to show how pleased I am,” 
and off he started again. Dudley sat still smoking, 
his eyes watching him with delight. The beauti- 
ful, clear-cut lines of the dog pleased him. Every 


53 


JOY 

limb seemed to have been so carefully fashioned 
and moulded by Nature, such pains bestowed by 
her on his intelligent little head: the golden tan 
of the markings, was drawn in two curtains of 
colour, evenly on each side, leaving a little line of 
white between; his ears, natural and uncut, were 
like velvet of the same warm golden tan, and in 
his dark brown eyes, shone his great canine soul, 
infinitely superior to the selfish, base and cruel 
soul of the average human being. Great in its 
disinterested affection, in its unselfishness, its fidel- 
ity, its devotion. 

“What depths of moral degradation the man 
must have fallen to, who can take a dog like this, 
and nail it on a board, and then slowly cut it up 
alive, watching Its agonies for days and weeks, 
under the name of Scientific Research,” he mused 
watching Scamp gambolling about on the floor 
from the mere joy of living. 

“And what a burden of sin lies on the com- 
munity which allows such things to be ! Scamp I 
Here, Scamp, leave that footstool and come and 
talk to me.” 

With one bound the dog was on his knee, and 
licked his cheek in joyful caresses. “Scamp, the 
public commits a horrible crime, when they allow 
beings like you to be given to the torture — thou- 
sands and thousands of warm-hearted affectionate 
dogs like you, every year. But, Scamp, Nature 
has an awful punishment in store for them. The 
serum they take from your blood In your agonies 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


54 

and torture, and put into the blood of poor de- 
luded human beings, vitiates and corrupts that 
blood, and fills it with unknown horrible diseases, 
and the blood of their children, and children’s 
children, unto countless generations. Nature is 
just. Scamp, and she never forgets and never for- 
gives, and she will avenge you.” 

The dog, disturbed in all its sensitive organisa- 
tion by the gravity that had come over his com- 
panion’s face, and the melancholy into his tones, 
began to whine, and moan. His ears drooped, and 
he put one paw appealingly on Dudley’s hand. 
“Never mind. Scamp,” said the man, gently strok- 
ing his straight white back; “Nature is just. Long 
after Medical Research and all its horrors have 
been exposed and abandoned, humanity will be 
wailing and writhing in the loathsome diseases 
which Medical Research has fastened upon it.” 
He kissed the dog’s head, and put him down on 
the floor again, and Scamp, thinking the painful 
moment for his friend was over, barked gaily, 
and tore about the room, while Dudley rose and 
lighted another cigarette. 

It was a silver night. By the time the violet 
dusk of twilight had imperceptibly melted into 
night, the moon was fully up, and her perfect disc 
shewed purely bright to a world turned silver by 
her magic. 

Dudley did not turn on the light in his drawing- 
room but stepped out into the balcony. He was 
astonished at die clear radiance enveloping every- 


JOY 55 

thing. The moonlight here at Newquay, on the‘ 
edge of the Atlantic, has a dazzling brilliance not 
found often in England. 

Dudley could not recall having seen the same 
quality of moonlight anywhere, except in Upper 
Egypt, and the Soudan. Colours were distinctly 
visible in it. The green grass on the top of the 
cliffs, and the bright red roofs of the houses above 
the harbour, across the bay, had the same colour 
values as by day. The sands shone distinctly 
golden yellow, just as on the banks of the Nile 
he remembered the rich orange desert sand had 
maintained the same fierceness of tone, that it 
possessed by day. Every object and detail before 
him was wonderfully visible, the little buildings 
on the island opposite, the branches of the trees, 
the paths leading about its rocky sides, the rippling 
emerald of the salt pool at Its base, which the tide 
had left behind in its retreat, all these stood out 
sharp and distinct in the soft effulgence of brilliant 
silver light. Silver instead of gold, the day was 
golden, and the night silver. That was the only 
difference here. It was very calm and beautiful, 
and he lingered a long time looking at the scene 
so sweetly still, so absolutely serene. No artist, he 
thought, would dare in a moonlight picture to put 
in such colours, such precision of detail, as one saw 
here, and he framed his eyes with his hands, for a 
moment, measuring just what he would take in on 
his canvas for the scene. 

Far out, across the now dry yellow sand of the 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


56 

bay, was the sea, a pale dull blue; the island 
joined to the mainland by its miniature suspension 
bridge, suggestive of Japan, in its fairy lightness, 
loomed large In the foreground, rich In its dark 
velvety shadows; across the bay, the old harbour 
wall, stone patched with red brick, and the har- 
bour entrance, with its jewel-like green light on 
the pier. Above the harbour on the cliffs, all 
round, the houses of Newquay perched pictur- 
esquely on point and edge, their roofs of many 
colours, crimson, scarlet, grey, or purplish brown, 
their windows dots of light, and over all the 
light falling everywhere in an argentine flood, 
illuminating everything with its silver glory. 
Where was she? he mused; sleeping tranquilly in 
her rocky cradle, or floating far out there on the 
breast of the sleeping ocean? 

He went up to his room, and to bed quite early, 
for he wanted to be up with the dawn, and go out 
to the cavern again as soon as he could. The 
casements of his window stood wide open, there 
was no need of candles, for there were great 
illuminating bands of light on floor and bed. He 
undressed and lay down hoping for sleep, but 
sleep did not come to him. 

Strange wayward visitant it is, coming upon us 
often when least desired, and unsought, so difficult 
and coy to woo and win when It is needed most. 
He closed his eyes, but his brain was keenly alive 
and awake, and the hours passed, and he could see 
the slow swing of the constellations beyond his 


JOY 57 

window, and their changed positions from time to 
time in the silvery sky. 

Towards one in the morning, he began to be 
conscious of a growing sound. It seemed to come 
from out of the far distance, and to be like the 
murmur of voices from a huge multitude. Very 
gradually it gathered volume and form, no longer 
vague and indefinite, it became ordered and regu- 
lar, and infinitely more beautiful. It seemed to 
rise and fall in measured cadences. It was now 
like the million voices of a mighty multitude sing- 
ing gloriously to some majestic rhythm, and as 
they sang advancing. Ever nearer, louder, fuller, 
more resonant seemed to roll the glorious flood of 
sound. It was still distant, but the mighty weight 
of it was Increasing. And beside the melody of 
voices In it there seemed other great sounds, that 
were not melody, but, as it were, great layers of 
deep sound from which the melody of the million 
voices rose and went pealing up through everlast- 
ing space. The roll of the countless chariots, and 
the thunder of horses’ hoofs, and deep music of a 
myriad strange instruments, seemed mingling with 
the sound, and the sense of advance was always 
there, the huge army with the thunder of Its hosts,, 
and the shouting of the captains, the roll of drums, 
the male bass tones, and the enchanting melody of 
the angelic choir, moved ever forward, unceas- 
ingly, irresistibly, relentlessly, in overpowering 
majesty. 

Louder and louder swelled the great chorus, 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


58 

deeper and more distinct the swelling roll of the 
low male voices; sweeter and clearer, soaring 
higher and higher, with more divine etherealness, 
the delicate female tones. And the vastness of the 
sound, with all its component parts blended and 
harmonised, seemed to fill the whole universe. 

Dudley sat up In bed, listening, wondering, and 
awe-struck, feeling Infilnltely little and helpless, as 
the triumphant sound surged on. For a moment 
he did not understand, did not recognise it, so far 
does man usually live removed from the great 
things of Nature, and all that he had heard of 
Sirens’ singing came to his memory. Then he 
realised it was the voice of the great Atlantic 
itself, singing the Victory song of triumph, of its 
all-conquering power, the voice of the Incoming 
tide. A little breeze was sweeping through the 
window now, and it had borne to him the sound 
of the advancing hosts. But still the images of 
Sirens sitting on the rocks and in the caverns re- 
turned to him, so perfect were the tones, so ex- 
quisite, and subtle the harmonies. Voices, divine 
voices to sweet accompaniments of lyre and harp, 
rose above all the deep tumult of the lower sounds. 
Now he could understand every legend, every 
poem about the Sirens’ song. On men ship- 
wrecked, hopeless and dying, the sea had mercy, 
and in exchange for torture, of fever and thirst, 
gave them these. Songs, divine melodies that bore 
them to Paradise, ere they died. Those who by 
chance survivd, would bring back tales and memo- 


JOY 59 

ries of these haunting melodies, of these songs 
that had lured them toward^s their grave. 

He remembered Violet’s boast that she had her 
hour of Opera. It was true. No Opera he had 
ever heard had drawn him more Into the very soul 
of melody, than this great all-encompassing voice 
of the sea. Sleep was now unneeded. He lay 
listening In an ecstasy of gratified sense. Perhaps 
everyone would not hear the music as he did. 
Perhaps the old, and the very materiabminded, 
would not be able to discern these Immortal har- 
monies, but those about to die, had heard, and 
long remembered. 

Not on every coast can the Sirens’ song be 
heard ; Dudley had never heard it before on any of 
the many seaboards he had visited, but these curi- 
ous cliffs, with their endless caverns of every size 
and shape, in which the water rose and fell to 
varying heights, made every combination of sound 
possible. In those vast caves were bowls and 
serrated edges, deep recesses, and low tunnels, 
tiny borings in the rock high up, great crypts and 
vaults below, a very orchestra of instruments wait- 
ing for the touch of the waves to bring out their 
music. And the winds and the waters came In and 
stirred them to life. The vaults became trom- 
bones as the water swelled in them, the tiny bor- 
ings were flutes as the wind rushed through, the 
serrated edges gave harp notes, and the flat face 
of the cliffs as the mighty waves struck them in 
unison for miles and miles down the coast, gave 


6o 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


the roar and thunder of countless drums. Not 
in nights of storm and wild weather is the glory 
of sound at its height. Raging water and shriek- 
ing wind havo the noise of tumult and fury, but 
they do not give birth to these exquisite melodies. 

On calm and stately nights, such as this, when 
the great tide rolls in unhurried and unfettered, 
when the waters rise and swell against the cliffs, 
and enter the caverns in the majesty of unques- 
tioning force, then the melodies are created and 
the air, expelled from the vast recesses by the in- 
rush and onrush of the waves, comes singing and 
sighing out in floods of melody, as if passing over 
a myriad of Pollan harps. 

Dudley lay listening in a trance of pleasure. 
He thought the tide must now be at the full, high 
beneath his windows, for the vast sound was more 
stationary and less like the tumult of advancing 
hosts, than a mighty orchestra, and the sweet 
female notes rose high and clear, the Sirens’ notes, 
singing of love and peace, to be found in white 
arms beneath the waves. He wondered if Wagner 
had any time received his inspiration from the 
ocean, for this was more like Wagnerian Opera 
than anything he could compare with it. These 
great masses of glorious and ordered sound, over 
which floated these heavenly melodies, and through 
all, at intervals recurring rhythmically, as the 
motif In an Opera, came the clear straight tone of 
a gigantic bell. Wonderfully melodious and 
resonant, deep and very musical from out of the 


JOY 6 1 

distance far along the coast, echoing from bay to 
bay and rock to rock, full triumphant, imperious, 
like a challenge and a summons, a long, haunting 
call from the depths of the sea. 

Newquay, perched on the surrounding cliffs, 
slept on unhearing, and unheeding, but he lay 
listening steadfastly while the magnificent orches- 
tra on the shore played its Incomparable melodies, 
filling with wild magic all the silver hours of the 
night. 

After so many mysterious and new experiences, 
Dudley, next morning. In spite of his eagerness 
to rise early, slept late, and had only time to dress 
and shave before his 9 o’clock breakfast was 
served. He hurried through this, looking out 
beyond die window as he sat at the table. 

It was a golden day, as it had been a silver 
night, golden and lustrous diamond blue. The 
sky was of a pale tint, studded and fretted with 
tiny pure white clouds, and had something of 
innocence and Infantile happiness. 

The sea, soft, sparkling sapphire, lay calm and 
tranquil. Indicative of gentle repose. It was 
leaving, lingeringly, the strand where Its Invisible 
armies had marched and sung the previous night. 
A great lightness of heart, a joy in the sweet sunny 
fairness of the day, filled the man as he looked. 
Within him his heart seemed riding on great rock- 
ing waves of joy. He was going to see her. He 
had just finished his breakfast, and was putting on 
his hat in the hall, when through the glass of the 


62 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


door he saw a telegraph boy come up the steps. 
Instantly, a grip closed on his heart. The wing 
of the approaching event fanned every sense and 
nerve in his frame. 

He opened the door. 

“Grant?” asked the boy. 

Dudley nodded, and took the telegram and tore 
it open. 

“Denny very ill. Come at once. — B ertha.” 


CHAPTER II 


HORROR 

He went back into the dining-room and shut the 
door. The telegram was crushed to a tiny ball 
in his hand. He walked up and down the room 
blindly, cursing in heart his marriage, as men 
have cursed that venerable Institution through the 
ages ever since they invented it. 

“Why, when I was free, did I tie myself?” 
came the old, inevitable question, pounding 
through his brain. Question to which there Is no 
answer but that man loves to be tied, fettered and 
shackled, otherwise why should he be always 
occupied with fastening fetters on himself? 

“Oh that infernal picture! Why did I tie my- 
self to this woman?” Over and over again he 
asked himself this question In those first few 
moments of madness. He had only just got away 
from his life In London, only had this one week 
of rest and peace here. Surely Fate could have 
let him have a few days’ enjoyment of this won- 
derful happiness she had just given him! Why 
did things always happen like this in life? No 
wonder Fate was represented as a capricious 
63 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


64 

woman! This was her delight — to give one a 
glimpse of divine happiness, of what one’s life 
might be, and then to snatch away the scene from 
before one’s eyes, and give one a great blow on 
the back of the head, which sent one reeling down 
to the blackest depths of despair ! 

He would not go back. He would not be driven 
by this maliolous Fate of his. Why should he not 
stay in the cavern listening to the Atlantic songs? 
Why should he not hide there? Who could find 
him or trace him? Foolish question. He knew 
within himself he would have to go. Fret, fume, 
resent it, rage as he might, he would have to go. 
He who is married must obey. 

It was his own fault, and yet In a certain sense 
it was not. That was the aggravating part of it. 
He would never have married for any reason 
whatever while Violet was alive, had he known 
of her existence. But she was dead. He had 
every right to believe that. After her in his life 
there was nothing but his Art, and while he had 
given his body and his heart to his country, his 
soul belonged wholly to his painting. In those 
three months that they kept him waiting after he 
had offered himself for the War, he knew he 
would have gone mad with grief over Violet’s 
death, but for his Art, that kept his soul alive. 
How well he remembered the wild longing he had 
to finish his picture of Medea; to leave it behind 
him as a token of his work; to leave it to the coun- 
try for which he was to die. He looked forward 


HORROR 


65 

to his death with a feverish eagerness, but he 
longed to crown his life of artistic achievement 
with this last triumph. And then, just then in 
those days of unbalanced judgment, when he had 
been racked with grief and tortured with Im- 
patient longing to get out to the field of battle 
and get done with life, and grief, and death, and 
everything, and yet yearning to fulfil the idea 
within him and leave a monument worthy of him, 
she had appeared — this woman with her gift of 
strange, weird unusual beauty, the very, living type 
of the ancient Medea, the sorceress that he was 
striving to reproduce to the modern world. She 
had not captured his senses. She was nothing to 
him. No woman in those moments could be, but 
she was the Medea, and when he looked at her, 
he felt the power to portray her, and all the liv- 
ing fire of an artist’s inspiration, all the magic 
force that enables a genius to create a work of 
genius, pouring through him. 

He had asked her to sit for him. He had very 
little time at his disposal, but he knew he could do 
It. The work of a genius under keen inspiration 
is so rapid, the decision of mind so Instant, and 
the power lent him so great, that the time he takes 
over any particular thing bears no relation to, 
and cannot be compared with, the time needed 
by an ordinary person to accomplish the same. 
In the odds and ends of time allowed him Dudley 
knew he could make a great picture if she would 
help him. She had helped him, but at a price. 


66 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


She had looked through her black eyelashes from 
under her midnight brows, and seen him. Seen all 
his strength and his beauty, and all his eager in- 
tensity of desire to achieve this work. She knew 
of his fame, his position, his wealth, and she de- 
sired all these things. She named her price. It 
was marriage. For a time Dudley would not give 
way. The idea was repellant to him. He went 
away to his camp and put the thought of Medea 
from him. But the command of real inspiration 
is very strong, all dominant, and the insidious 
thought was always there : “You are going to die. 
You will not come back from the war. You will 
be sure to be killed. If Violet is anywhere you 
will rejoin her. Do this great picture before you 
go, and leave it behind you in the world.” 

At the end of a week of struggle — futile strug- 
gle, as it must always be when a mortal tries to win 
against a god, which indeed genius is — he had seen 
his Medea again, and thrown himself on her 
mercy. He had begged to be left his freedom, 
anything else he would give her if she would but 
leave him that. But she was not moved. She 
lost the chance of acting nobly and earning a 
man’s life-long gratitude, and preferred to drive 
the hateful bargain which Jacob made with Esau. 
He was hungry, and Jacob snatched his birthright, 
giving him the pottage he desired. Dudley was 
hungry after the fulfilment of his Idea, and she 
snatched his liberty as she granted his wish. 

They were married very quietly. So long as 


HORROR 


67 

she had the chains tight she was quite willing to 
forego all parade, and Dudley painted quickly, 
steadfastly, unfalteringly at high pressure under 
constant inspiration, which never failed him, and 
at the end of the three months he had completed 
the best thing of his life. 

Satisfied, he went out to the War, as he thought, 
hoped, and fully believed — to die. 

He had not died. Fate had brought him back 
to a tangled and chained existence, and to the 
companionship of a woman with whom he had no 
single idea in common. The fact that she was his 
equal, for not even for his Art would he have 
gone out of his own rank to marry, made things 
worse rather than better. Some person below him 
he might by bribes have induced to keep away 
from him, but Bertha Gray, the daughter of an 
officer, a distant connection of his own and in his 
own society, could not be easily dismissed. She 
was there — always; beautiful, but not In the style 
he liked; inartistic, unpoetical, practical and ma- 
terial to a point that drove him to desperation: 
silly, unreasoning as a child, devoted solely to her 
dress and appearance, and in her own unwise 
artificial way to their son, Dennis, now just three 
years old. 

Dudley looked again at the wire: “Denny was 
ill.” Of course. He was always 111, because his 
mother would never let him alone. A doctor was 
always in the house. Every new trick was tried 
on the unfortunate child; every new crank in 


68 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


search of guineas and experiments was consulted. 
To Dudley’s horror and amazement, when he re- 
turned on his first leave, she had already had the 
child vaccinated and his appendix and tonsils cut 
out, so that when he asked to see his son she could 
only show him the pallid remnant of humanity the 
doctors and surgeons had left of Nature’s perfect 
work. Poor little sallow-faced object, with dark 
rings about its sad large eyes, it had seemed to 
gaze upon him reproachfully. Dudley had raved 
and stormed, and Bertha, all her pride in her 
wretched handiwork beaten down under his fierce 
condemnation, had sat and wept, repeating over 
and over again : 

“But they told me it was good to take out his 
tonsils !” 

And he had replied furiously: 

“Good? It’s good for them to earn their 
guineas, of course! Have you no sense and no 
judgment of your own? Can’t you see through 
these people? Would you believe a burglar if 
he told you it was good for you to have your 
plate stolen?” 

Wretched, wretched days they had been after 
his home coming. He ground his teeth as he re- 
membered them. His ideas and hers were so 
totally different. He believed in Nature, and 
would have brought his child up in the sun and sea 
air, on milk from the mother’s breast, and long 
natural sleeps in her arms, and later he would 
have had him play about in the open, free as a 


HORROR 


69 

lion cub, nursed by the winds and sun of Heaven. 
She had but one idea of up-bringing — darkened 
rooms and patent foods, medicine and operations, 
the paid ministrations of doctor and nurse. 

He had forbidden both of these in his house, 
but now, in his absence, he guessed what had hap- 
pened. Some crank had been tampering again 
with his child, and this was the result. She was 
both rich and silly. These are the ones beloved 
by the medical profession, and on whom it lives 
and preys. 

Dudley, with white-hot fury in his heart, rang 
the bell. ‘‘I have to go to town by the 1 1 :20 
train to-day,” he said, when pretty Mrs. Butler 
appeared, “but I will keep on the house, and I 
shall hope to get back in a few days or a week, 
ril let you know, from town.” 

And with that he went upstairs and put together 
a few things to take with him. He felt that mad 
anger seething in him that all captives feel when 
the chain pulls and grinds upon their neck. 

The train was rather late and it was past eight 
in the evening before he reached his own house. 
He paid the taxi, had his bag set down, and let 
himself In with his latchkey. Two men were stand- 
ing in the hall lauding and talking. As he came 
in they glanced towards him, and Dudley recog- 
nised them Immediately as doctors. The clever 
phyisognomist can tell, with few exceptions, the 
doctor, the surgeon, and the man engaged in medi- 
cal research at a glance. As has been often said, 


70 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


there Is no such thing as secret vice. A man’s 
constant or even frequent actions, are all written 
large upon his face. His only hope of privacy 
lies in the fact that he meets mostly the unthinking, 
uneducated eye that does not see in his counte- 
nance what is so plainly there. And that this must 
he so Is obvious, for everyone of o^r actions has 
its accompanying expression. That expression is 
simply the set of our lips, the pull of all the little 
muscles of the face. Whenever we do an action 
we have that action’s expression on our face, and 
if any action is often repeated, again and again, 
that expression is ours; the lips are set and the 
muscles pulled in the same way until, finally, they 
remain in that set and that pull. Corresponding 
lines, imperceptible at first, are formed, and as 
these deepen and harden the expression that reveals 
us and our habitual actions becomes stamped per- 
manently, Indelibly on our visage. Anyone who 
Jias watched a surgeon or medical research worker 
at his work, will have been struck by the eager, 
gloating pleasure on his face. The eyes pro- 
trude, the mouth fills with saliva, its comers are 
nervously drawn down, sometimes the tongue is 
a little put out, giving an incredibly sly look. Is 
there an atom of sympathy with the helpless being 
in his hands; one iota of sorrow for the agony he 
is creating? No; only sensual, gloating joy. 
And while he works. Nature brands upon his face 
the index to his mind. But so few there are who 
see! So that doctor and surgeon and research 


HORROR 


71 


worker walk about in the open with their secret 
practices stamped on their face, but the man in 
the street only thinks: “Ugly looking beggar” as 
he passes by. He does not stop to ask himself 
what that awful expression means. 

“Let me pass, please,” Dudley said sharply as 
the two men, standing just at the foot of the stairs, 
blocked his way. 

They drew back, and he went up. At the top 
of the first flight he saw his wife. She was In a 
black dinner dress that threw up the fairness of 
her neck and arms. It would be difficult to 
imagine anything more lovely In Its own way. It 
was the beauty of artifice, of the exotic flower, but 
in early youth artifice does not spoil greatly. The 
masses of her dark hair had red lights In them 
that Nature had not given. Her eyes, great wells 
of glorious darkness, were shadowed round with 
over-blackened lashes; her lips glowed like a 
pomegranate bud, and the bloom of the most 
delicate Parisian paint was on her cheeks. The 
light fell on her from above, soft shaded light, 
caressing all the exquisite lines of her form and 
face. 

Dudley paused the fraction of a second and 
looked at her. 

“Rightly called Medea,” he muttered In his 
heart, “the enchantress. Charms and paints and 
dyes, poison and murder and death.” 

“Oh, you’re come at last! It seemed so long!” 
was her greeting. 


72 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


“I came by the first train,” returned Dudley 
shortly, as he joined her, and they went together 
into the drawing-room. “Well, how is the boy?” 
he asked. “What’s the matter with him?” 

“Oh, Dudley,” she answered nervously, “I 
know you’ll be angry, but — but he seemed ill, and 
there was so much typhoid fever about, and the 
doctors said It would be good for him to be in- 
oculated, and so, of course, I thought they must 
know, so I agreed, but he got worse and worse, 
and his arm seems poisoned, and now they say 
it must come off or he’ll die.” 

Dudley stood still as If he were stone. In- 
stinctively he prayed for self-command that he 
might not murder this woman who stood before 
him, or either of the men who were laughing in 
the hall. 

But Nature, when she had given him his intense 
and passionate temperament, had also given him 
an iron self-control. He summoned it all now, 
and his voice was cold and steady as he answered : 

“They want to amputate his arm?” 

“Yes, they say It’s the only chance; they wanted 
to do it to-day, but I ... I didn’t care to, 
without your consent. I said I must wait to ask 
you. I wanted you to . . . to . . . have 
the responsibility . . .” 

“I see,” replied Dudley coldly. “Well, let me 
look at the boy. Is he upstairs?” 

“No, I had him moved down here; come and 
see him.” She went to the door and Dudley fol- 


HORROR 


73 


lowed. He was raging inwardly, rocked by such 
a storm of indignation and revolt as rarely came 
over him. But he knew that he was helpless and 
probably too late. Ineradicable mischief had been 
done in his absence; he had only been called upon 
to share the responsibility of the results ! 

They entered the room together — a fine, large, 
second drawing-room really turned Into a tem- 
porary sick room. A fire was burning, and two 
young, nice-looking nurses were sitting on either 
side of It. They rose as Dudley came in. He 
went straight up to the bed where the poor little 
creature lay, whose short experience of this world 
had been one of constant pain. It unclosed its 
eyes as Dudley came up, and looked at him, as 
some poor little martyred animal might have done. 
It was very small ; almost lost In the bed amongst 
the cambric sheets and rose silk counterpane. 

Dudley’s eyes filled as he looked down upon it. 
“Denny,” he said softly, bending over it. The 
child made no response; only gazed at him out 
of Its great dark eyes. 

“Let me escape; let me out of this horrible 
world,” was the thought he seemed to read in 
them. Its little arm with a surgical bandage 
round the upper part, lay outside the quilt; the 
lower part and hand were black. On Its neck, 
by the chin, there was a large sore. And this 
was the boy that he had seen shortly after its 
birth a magnificent and perfectly formed child ! 

His wife was speaking: 


74 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


“His skin was all right till the inoculation, and 
then he came out all over in these dreadful sores. 
Isn’t it strange?” 

“No, I don’t think it’s at all strange,” returned 
Dudley bitterly. “It’s exactly what I would ex- 
pect. There are cases and cases of every kind of 
suffering and misery following these abominable 
inoculations.” 

The two nurses, who had followed Dudley to 
the bed and were now standing beside it, their 
faces set in a conventional sympathy, started and 
looked at each other. 

This was new language indeed. Whatever hap- 
pened usually to their unfortunate patient, the re- 
lations generally were docile and tractable enough, 
listening always meekly to the dictum of the 
medical profession that if a patient died it was en- 
tirely his own doing, and the doctors had nothing 
to do with it. If, however, he recovered, he had 
nothing to do with it; the credit of the cure was 
all the doctors’!” 

They looked now in startled admiration upon 
this parent who dared to utter heresy like this. 

“What do you think of him?” asked Bertha 
anxiously, bending down and peering curiously 
at her handwork. 

“I think he is going to die,” replied Dudley 
laconically. 

The nurses jumped again. Bertha burst into 
tears. “Oh, Dudley. I did all for the best. 
They told me the inoculation was harmless.” 


HORROR 


75 


Dudley was silent. He looked at her for a 
moment with contempt, then he gazed again at 
the poor little scrap before him. His heart was 
wrung by that look in the child’s eyes; wrung as 
if a great hand grasped It. But he knew he could 
do nothing — nothing but grant the last mercy — 
Death — to the life he had created and others had 
destroyed. 

“But won’t the operation save him?” sobbed 
Bertha. “They say the arm is poisoned, but when 
they’ve got that away, there’s a chance.” 

“I don’t think there’s the slightest,” he returned. 
“And don’t you think it is better that he Should 
die now, rather than live with his system thor- 
oughly poisoned, his blood vitiated, and without 
his arm?” 

He drew himself up and looked her full In 
the face. In his eyes was a withering scorn; his 
voice had an icy contempt in It. The nurses 
nudged each other and thought he looked splendid. 
Bertha stared back at him in dazed fear. Then 
she broke into sobs again: “No, no, I want him 
to live, and so would you if you loved him as I do ! 
Oh, Denny, Denny.” There was a peremptory 
tap at the door, and then it was pushed open. 
The doctor came in. “Well, I suppose you’ve 
obtained Mr. Grant’s consent?” he said brusquely, 
addressing Bertha. “There is no other course 
open really.” 

Dudley seized the man’s arm in a grip that made 
him wince. 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


76 

“Look at your work I” he said in a low voice, 
hard with anger. “Aren’t you satisfied? You 
see the child’s dying. Nothing can save It. 
You’ve done for him amongst you! Why do 
you want to still further torture him by an opera- 
tion?” 

The doctor shook his arm free with a wrathful 
gesture, but he kept his temper. He was going to 
carry that operation through, and to be ordered 
from the house by this tiresome, interfering father, 
would not suit him just then. He had promised 
his young friend. Surgeon Smith, the job, and he 
would see it through. 

“Really, Mr. Grant,” he answered pompously, 
resetting his gold pince-nez over his nose. “Really, 
I don’t understand you, but I make every allow- 
ance for your natural feelings. The child has had 
the best attention; a puny child, a weakly con- 
stitution, of course ” But Dudley interrupted 

him. 

“It’s a He,” he said hotly. “You know per- 
fectly well the child was absolutely healthy till 
you put the serum from some of your diseased 
animals into Its veins.” 

The doctor saw he was on the wrong tack, and 
changed Immediately. “Well, there, there,” he 
said soothingly, “have it that the boy was healthy 
if you like; a strong boy, then he’s all the more 
likely to pull through the operation. Isn’t he? 
Come, Mr. Grant, we’re wasting time. Let us get 


HORROR 


77 

to work at once, and I’ll guarantee you a per- 
fectly successful operation.” 

Dudley, with his face white and his jaw set, 
looked back at the face opposite him — evil, crafty, 
gloating under its mask of superficial urbanity. 

‘‘No pain, not the slightest, an anaesthetic, you 
know, and when he wakes up, our little friend- 
will be all right again.” 

“Only without his arm; a mere trifle,” returned 
Dudley bitterly. 

Bertha came up to him and laid her hand im- 
ploringly on his arm. 

“Oh, Dudley, do consent. Think how dread- 
fully you will reproach yourself if he dies and you 
think that the operation would have saved him. 
Do believe in Dr. Brown. He has been so good. 
Do, please, please, give Denny the chance to live.” 

Dudley looked into the mindless beauty of the 
pleading face for a moment, with a fierce con- 
tempt for her credulity and folly. Then he looked 
again at the little, still, wax-like face in the bed 
that never moved except to close and unclose its 
despairing eyes. He was so far gone into the 
Valley of the Shadow that nothing really mat- 
tered. Dudley saw that the faint flicker of life 
remaining must go out at the first breath of the 
anaesthetic. They would only be hacking at a 
dead body. Denny could not suffer, that was all 
that concerned him now, that the child should die 
In peace. Perhaps it was better that Bertha should 
not be able to think the fault was his. He stooped 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


78 

over his son and put his lips to the tiny forehead. 
He was so sorry, so very sorry for him. 

The doctor coughed. “Of course a nursing 
home would have been preferable, but I under- 
stood from Mrs. Grant that you objected ” 

Dudley cut him short. “I do. The operation 
must be here or not at all.” 

The doctor rubbed his hands genially. “Yes, 
yes, I — er — understood so, and I have made all 
the arrangements. 

“Mr. Smith and the anaesthetist are both In the 
house and everything Is in readiness. If you will 
kindly leave us, we can get on now.” 

Dudley walked past him to the door. When he 
was close to him he looked him full In the face. 

“Murderer!” he said In a low steel-lIke tone, 
and went out. His blood was simply boiling with 
rage from head to foot, as he went down the 
stairs and through a short passage that led to an- 
other part of the house. But what could he do? 
He could have ordered the man out of his house, 
with his surgeon friend, anaesthetist and nurses, 
and this Is what he would have done unhesitatingly 
had he been alone, but he did not feel inclined to 
lay himself open to Bertha’s never ending re- 
proaches and upbraldings, her future charge 
against him, that he had killed Denny, that every- 
thing would have been all right If he had only 
not Interfered, and forbidden die all-healing and 
saving operation. 

He walked on to get away from that part of 


HORROR 


79 


the house, where the villainous work was going 
forward, and reached his own particular library, 
entered, switched on the lights, and threw him- 
self into a chair. 

‘Toor, poor little Denny! poor little fellow.” 
He remembered him. Such a jolly strong baby, 
and now — the little white face, the dark reproach- 
ful eyes, seemed looking back at him from all the 
walls. He burled his face In his hands. Never, 
never, never, he swore within himself, would he 
bring into this world another child, to be treated 
as this had been. Slowly the minutes passed by, 
painfully to his war-racked nerves. As he sat 
there, all the horrid scenes of those years just 
behind him, came back upon him. Scenes on which 
he never let his thoughts dwell If he could help it, 
and of these pictures that returned to him, those 
on the battle field were less horrible and loathsome 
than those In dressing station and hospital ward. 

Now and here in his own home. It was some- 
thing of the same thing over again. 

Oh, how he hated this woman with her stupidity 
and her artificiality, her credulity that made her 
the sport of anyone who could stuff her ears with 
scientific jargon, her love of quacks and cranks 
and drugs and nostrums. Her portrait, his picture 
of her, to accomplish which he had sold himself 
into slavery, hung opposite him on the wall. He 
looked at it now. It was perfect, beautiful, a 
living thing. It was the Medea of the ancient 
world given life again. As he gazed at It now, 


8o 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


Into the painted eyes, a living flame seemed to 
pass Into them, the lips almost seemed to move, 
the serpent colled Into the black glory of the hair 
seemed almost breathing. He gazed at It, held 
by the wonderful realism, and as he looked, it 
flashed suddenly across his brain that she, too, the 
ancient myth encircled Medea, had murdered her 
children. And equally, as surely, as she In a mad- 
ness of grief had killed them, so had this modern 
mother killed her child, meddling with poisons 
more deadly than the black magic of her proto- 
type. 

“Strange coincidence,” he muttered to himself. 
Then he closed his eyes and with an effort of will 
tried to shut from him the thought of her and 
of death and murder and the whole loathsome 
subject of disease and doctors and surgeons, the 
ignorance, brutality and callousness of the times 
we live In, and suddenly peace flowed through his 
brain. The cavern, the cavern, with Its fresh 
wild winds sweeping through, the voice of the 
singing sea, the laugh of the waves and the drift of 
the flying spray ! His mind clung to these things 
that were pure and sound and sane! To the 
thought of the life-giving sunlight, the health- 
giving sleep, the clean white physic of pure air 
and a simple life, the joy of the floating clouds 
and the wheeling gulls. His mind filled itself with 
these images, and grew soothed and calm. 

There was a knock on his door, and then it 
was pushed open. The jocular young surgeon, 


HORROR 8 1 

Mr. Smith, entered, accompanied by a simpering 
nurse. 

Dudley looked up In silence. 

‘‘Well, sir,” remarked Mr. Smith, “I have to 
report the operation has been successful, entirely 
successful.” From his point of view it certainly 
had been. Had he not had his practice and earned 
his guineas? 

Dudley continued to gaze steadfastly on the 
flushed and disordered looking face of the young 
man, without speaking. Mr. Smith proceeded 
cheerfully: “The child passed away quite com- 
fortably under the anaesthetic! Quite comfort- 
ably!” 


CHAPTER III 


REGRET 

The Inquest was over. Dudley had insisted on 
having one. The doctor, surgeon, anaesthetist, 
and nurses had all been white-washed, extolled 
and s}TnpathIsed with as usual. As is customary 
when any relation Is so rash as to express himself 
dissatisfied at the way a patient has been treated, 
a squad of doctors had been summoned to the aid 
of Dr. Brown, and had lied, and lied, and lied 
with the dexterity and force that comes with long 
practice. 

The medical profession would never have at- 
tained the despotism it now has over a foolish pub- 
lic but for Its marvellous esprit de corps. It Is the 
rarest thing In the world for one doctor to give 
away another. Though Dr. X. may know per- 
fectly well that Dr. Y., through either Ignorance, 
callousness or carelessness, or a mixture of all 
three, has murdered his patient, when called upon 
to do so, he will swear without hesitation that 
Dr. Y.’s treatment has been a miracle of skill and 
perfection. In the witness-box he Is delightfully 
solemn, and grave, and weighty, and when he has 
82 


REGRET 


83 

impressed everyone with his scientific language and 
well-ordered accents, he goes off laughing in his 
sleeve and with his tongue in his cheek, to be 
patted on the back by Dr. Y. for having got him 
out of what might have been a nasty scrape, and 
Dr. Y. will lie for him in the same way, of course, 
when the necessity arises. 

By the medical evidence in this case it was made 
to appear that Denny was a sick and suffering 
child from birth, that could not have had the boon 
of living up to three years but for the devotion 
and care of its disinterested and noble-minded 
medical attendant, for whom the seven hundred 
and fifty-five guineas, that Dudley stated he had 
paid him, seemed all too small a remuneration. 
Dudley was reprimanded for having demurred to 
the operation after the surgeon had advised it, and 
thus caused some delay, which, undoubtedly, 
brought about the death of the child! The cor- 
oner also rebuked him for the obvious ingratitude 
he had displayed to the unselfish doctor who had 
done so much for him. 

In the large drawing-room that seemed strangely 
empty and silent, husband and wife sat and looked 
at each other across the tea-table. 

Bertha was in the deadliest black possible, and 
her face looked white and wretched enough to 
justify the density and voluminousness of her 
mourning. 

‘‘You see, it wasn’t any good having an Inquest; 
they all took the doctor’s side,” she said. 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


84 


“They always do,” Dudley answered shortly. 
“I never expected anything else, but I am glad I 
had the inquest all the same. There are some 
people who will read that report who will believe 
my evidence and know just bow much value to 
attach to that of Dr. Brown and his contingent of 
witnesses. I am not the only father whose child 
has been killed under his eyes.” 

Bertha looked back at him; tears welled over 
her lashes. 

“Oh, Dudley, I am so wretched ! Do take me 
away somewhere. Let’s go down together to 
Newquay. I want to get away from here. You’ve 
got your rooms there all ready, let’s go down to- 
morrow.” 

Dudley let his eyes wander over his wife’s 
elaborately-waved hair, her delicately-painted face, 
her thin and costly draperies, and her high-heeled, 
narrow shoes. He shook his head. 

“I don’t think you would care for Newquay at 
all,” he answered. “There are no promenades, 
no piers, no fashions to see, nowhere for thin shoes 
to walk ; only wild rocks and steps cut in the cliff, 
and damp salt winds, which are bad for large hats 
and waved hair, and at this time there are no 
people to admire your gowns — I am sure you 
would hate it.” 

“Why do you like it so much then?” 

“Oh, because of the glorious sea, and the sun, 
the golden days, and the silver night, the sunset 
skies, and the music on the shore.” 


REGRET 85 

“Music?” echoed Bertha a little more brightly. 
“There are bands, then!” 

Dudley laughed Ironically : 

“Yes, there’s the best band In the world — the 
band of the great Atlantic Ocean, with its troupe 
of performing waves; plays nightly; all seats 
free I” 

“Oh, the sea 1 ” she returned blankly. “Is that 
all? What a stupid place 1” 

“From your point of view, yes. I love It. I 
love the grand, rocky coast, and at this time of 
the year, its wild solitude. To get away from 
crowds, to be alone with my work and Nature, 
that’s what I want.” 

“Let’s go somewhere else, then. I can’t stay 
here. I must get a change.” 

“Go with your mother to Brighton for a week 
or so — you know you never want to be away from 
town long.” 

“But I want to be with you, Dudley, I really 
do,” she answered In a pleading tone. “Give me 
one of those de Reszkes, you are smoking them 
all.” She stretched out a slim and beautiful hand. 

Durley gave her a cigarette, then he got up 
and went over to the mantlepiece, where he stood 
leaning against it. 

She pushed her chair back from the tea-table, 
crossed her legs and leant back, smoking her cigar- 
ette delicately, prettily, and looking at him with 
her eyes full of questioning. Doubt and fear be- 
gan to take possession of her. He seemed In 


■86 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


some curious way hard, mplacable, unapproach- 
able, but he was so handsome, she thought, as he 
leant there, his attitude, his pose was so graceful, 
his figure so perfect. War had not harmed him, 
but developed him, strengthened him ; he was in- 
finitely handsomer now than before his marriage, 
and the air of Indefinable disdain and aloofness 
he wore just now, seemed to suit so well his dis- 
tinguished head and straight features. 

She desired him, wanted him, loved him In her 
own way so much. 

Dudley took out a cigarette for himself and 
smoked it in silence for a few seconds before he 
answered. 

“After what you have made me suffer over 
Denny,” he said, speaking with the quiet Intensity 
of deep feeling, “I never wish to have another 
child by you; never, and I don’t Intend to. For 
that reason I don’t wish tO' go on living with you. 
You are very young and very beautiful, and if we 
do go on living together, children will be the re- 
sult, and then all this misery all over again, more 
or less, and I can’t stand It. Why should I ? I 
don’t love you. I never loved you. I told you so* 
before we married. I warned you you were mak- 
ing a mistake even for your own sake. You in- 
sisted. Then there was Denny — I did love him, 
and through him I could have loved you, if you 
had kept faith with me. But you didn’t. You 
broke all your promises. I left him to you In 
trust, and you betrayed that trust most cruelly and 


REGRET 87 

deliberately. Well, rm not going to take any 
more chances, that’s all.” 

In spite of his effort to control himself and keep 
perfectly calm, his voice shook with anger as he 
finished. 

As for Bertha, she had grown to the colour of 
white marble as she listened to his speech. There 
was a relentlessness, an implacability about it that 
terrified her. 

“But if ... if ... I promised faithfully,” 
she stammered with white lips. 

Dudley gave a dry laugh : 

“You did that before.” 

“Yes, I know, but . . . but . . . Oh Dudley!” 
The last was a sharp exclamation. She stretched 
out her arms, clutched at a chair near her, then 
sank to the floor unconscious. 

Dudley had sprung forward but was too late to 
save her fall. He lifted her up gently, and put 
her on the couch. She made a lovely picture lying 
there, motionless, senseless, with her pale face be- 
neath its cloud of dark glossy hair, and her form 
so slight and girlish that it seemed like a little 
heap of crushed silken drapery and not a body 
that rested on the sofa. 

Dudley felt no throb of love or attraction pass 
through him as he put her handkerchief, that he 
had dipped into the vase of lilies standing near, 
and held It as a cold compress to her forehead. 
The person who did all the harm and mischief to 
others possible, and then tried to impose upon their 


«8 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


forbearance by the show of a theatrical repentance, 
never appealed to him. And this very swoon it- 
self, genuine as it was, he knew was brought about 
by all the artifice he so much disliked. Draughts 
to make her sleep at night, aspirin to take away 
the headache in the morning that the draughts had 
made. No wonder she fainted easily and often. 

He sat beside her, lifting, damping and re- 
placing the compress, smoothing back the dark, 
silky curls from her forehead, and noting the red 
edge to them where they had been so unnecessarily 
tinged with Henna. After a few minutes she 
opened her large dark eyes upon him and smiled. 

“Too much aspirin,” he said gently as she sat 
up. “Do you feel better?” 

“Yes, I feel all right; it was what you said 
upset me so.” 

Dudley got up and moved restlessly about the 
room. He wanted to be away; to be over and 
done with all this. He hated giving pain. He did 
not wish his wife ill. Let her make any arrange- 
ment she liked; lead any life that pleased her. 
He would let her have the house, money, any- 
thing, but he could not give up his freedom. 
His nerves were terribly on edge. They were 
strained to the breaking point. If he could only 
escape somewhere to be quiet. When he had gone 
down to Newquay he had been on the point of 
collapse, and before he had recovered he had been 
summoned back to all this horror; for to him it 
was nothing less. Denny’s murder, and all the 


REGRET 


89 

whole loathsome net of evil that he had been 
dragged into, had nearly destroyed the remains 
of his nervous strength. The child’s deep, re- 
proachful gaze seemed photographed on his brain, 
together with the pompous, solemn faces of the 
doctors in court, and their sly grins on leaving it. 
The whole miserable travesty of truth and justice 
that he had been through, the perception of the 
way this new tyranny of the medical profession 
was being fitted on to the neck of a public too 
imbecile to see how they were being enslaved, all 
these things had so acted on his sensitive and 
nervous organisation, that life here seemed un- 
bearable. He must get away. It was not Violet 
that he thought of in those moments. It was the 
vast illimitable plain of the ocean, the shore un- 
marked by a foot touch, the infinite peace of the 
sea. ‘‘I think if you are feeling better, I will 
take a turn before dinner,” he said quietly. “I 
don’t feel able to discuss anything just now, and 
you’d better lie down and take a good rest.” 

Bertha was about to demur to this as on general 
principles, or perhaps only from habit, she always 
demurred to his expressed wishes, but glancing up 
at him, she saw how strangely white and strained- 
looking his face had become, so she only answered : 

“Very well — we can talk at dinner.” 

Dudley left the room and went downstairs and 
out. 

After dinner that night when the coffee had been 
served and they were alone in the drawing-room, 


90 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


Bertha returned to the attack, and Dudley, looking 
across at her as she sat under the soft rose shaded 
light, knew, that like the Medea of old, she had 
called to her aid all the magic of beauty and 
the enchantments of which she was mistress. She 
was dressed in black chiffon of the costliest quality, 
and its silky gleaming blackness framed very 
beautifully the soft, perfect whiteness of her skin; 
her only ornament was a three-fold row of pearls 
round her throat, and a string of pearls wound 
through her rich, glossy curling hair, and binding 
it close to her head. Her cheeks and lips were 
tinted, her eyes darkened, but nothing could spoil 
the triumphant lustre of her youth and glorious 
beauty — artifice only seemed to- heighten It, to 
make It burn into the eye. And there was an 
overpowering flattery in the thought that all this 
physical beauty was for him alone ; that the woman 
who owned it was entirely his; that she had 
heightened her beauty and decked it out for him 
alone. This was no ball room triumph; there 
were no eyes but his to dazzle, and she wanted 
none. He knew that to capture his senses, subdue 
him, keep him for her own with the same beauty, 
with which she had first won him, was her one 
all-dominating Idea. But in her earliest conquest 
his Art had been her great ally. It was the 
tremendous impulse of that which had pushed him 
into her arms. Now that was gone, she knew she 
had to rely solely on the power of aroused desire. 
Dudley sunk in an armchair opposite her with a 


REGRET 


9 ^ 

cigarette between bis lips, sat and watched her 
dreamily. The ancient Medea had mixed love 
potions and philtres and pressed poisons into her 
service for subduing Jason, and the modern 
Bertha, following the same theory, had selected 
herself the wines for their dinner that night; they 
were old and choice, and his favourites. So that 
now, with irritation soothed, and a feeling of rest 
and vague superficial contentment, Dudley sat and 
gazed upon the enchanting loveliness before him. 
The tiny little foot, encased in its slender shoe, 
the delicate ankle in its transparent stocking, the 
wonderfully graceful and sinuous lines of the body 
under its black veil, the gleaming arms, and neck 
leading up to the crowning radiance of the brll« 
llant face, each of these was an exquisite detail in 
the perfect whole. He hardly heard what she was 
saying, so absorbed was he in the sense and pleas- 
ure of sight. 

Then her voice came to him clearly again: “I 
should be so sorry to lose you. You must not go 
away from me, I want you so much.” 

The immense flattery of the words from that 
exquisite mouth seemed to pour over him like 
some Invisible balm. Her passion for him was 
perfectly genuine, and It lent to- her tones that 
beauty, that wonder of softness that only passion 
can give. ‘‘After all,” the music of that voice 
went on, as Dudley did not answer but sat silent, 
sunk deep In his armchair gazing at her, “I am 
your Medea, and why should I not give you other 


92 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


pictures? You were happy while you were paint- 
ing Medea ; paint me again. Let us forget every- 
thing that has happened and start from to-day. 
I will give you all my time, pose all day for you 
if you can think of something you want to paint. 
I would do anything rather than you should go 
away from me.” 

The beautiful accents, soft edged with love, fell 
gently on his ears, and between her speeches she 
made little pauses In which she just sat idle and 
gazed at him, and In the silence of the large room, 
filled with caressing light and the fragrance of 
lilies from many vases, it seemed to him as if her 
beauty was some magic force growing more dom- 
inant every moment, while he grew more and more 
helpless to resist It. In the rose colour thrown 
from the shaded lamp at her side, she seemed to 
be expanding, blooming like some exotic flower. 
The colour glowed in her cheeks through the deli- 
cate transparent skin, great fires were lighted in 
the midnight eyes, the parted lips were beautiful 
in their fresh scarlet, transcending any tint she 
might have added to them. 

Slowly his antagonism towards her was sinking, 
being defeated by that force which was gathering 
in the room: the strongest though the least en- 
during force in the world. After a few moments’ 
silence Bertha rose and came towards him, lightly, 
and without sound, like a moving shadow. She 
stopped by his chair and dropped at his feet, a 
faint and exquisitely fresh scent of roses coming 


REGRET 


93 


to him, as she put up both her arms to clasp his 
waist, the soft, warm touch of them slid past his 
hands. 

“Dudley, I love you so much! Don’t go away 
from me,” she whispered, looking up at him with 
the colour rising gently In her cheeks, a world of 
melting seducing passion in the glorious eyes. 

“Kiss me!” The words came in only a half- 
murmur from her arched red lips. 

Dudley, helpless in that wonderful electric 
wave that eddies and closes round us so swiftly 
shutting out sight of any shore, leant over her 
suddenly, clasped her In arms of steel and drew 
her up Into his embrace. 

Towards three o’clock the following morning 
Dudley awoke. His mind was quite clear. It 
seemed to him. In fact, that it was the wrath of 
his mentality against his physical Impulses, by 
which it had been conquered last night, that had 
awakened him. 

It seemed as If his mind was calling to him and 
Insisted on his getting up and away. It seemed 
as If he heard a voice within him saying: “This 
is not what you really want; this will not give 
you happiness nor content. Why rivet these 
dialns afresh?” 

The room was full of dim grey light. His wife 
was still sleeping. He could see her beautiful 
head half submerged In the pillow beside him. 
He looked at her, but the glamour of last night 


94 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


had gone. She was just the same, but that peculiar 
dazzle, that shimmering net of light that passion 
weaves before a man’s eyes, through which the ob- 
ject Is seen, immensely glorified, was gone. Grati- 
fication had rent It aside. He looked at her coldly 
now. Reaction had set in. Reason and memory 
had returned, bringing cold anger against himself 
in their train. 

Why has Nature fixed this curious spring-back 
of all the emotions to follow in the wake of pas- 
sion? Why has she set the sharpest and bitterest 
moment In life immediately to follow the most en- 
trancing? One wonders. Perhaps it Is part of 
her plan of Insurance for the greatest reproduction 
possible, to part Immediately the two mates she 
has brought together, once her purpose of the 
third life is accomplished. The male, being bound 
by sentiments of affection to his one and only mate. 
Is no scheme of Nature’s. By planting within him 
this Inevitable impulse of reaction, she seems to 
have wished to disgust him with his first mate, 
and to lead him away to seek another as soon as 
possible. To each object in turn, she lends the 
same fiery garment with which to dazzle the be- 
holder’s eyes and ensnare him. From each In 
turn, she drags the magic veil ruthlessly and 
pitilessly when the ensnared one Is to be set free. 
Perhaps, for Nature’s great schemes, her method 
is sound. It Is the Individual man, face to face 
with disillusionment, and the Individual woman, 
face to face with humiliation, that suffer. And 


REGRET 


95 

for the disenchanted man and the aggrieved wo- 
man, Nature does not care at all. 

A complete prey to this dissllluslonment com- 
mon to all passion but Infinitely sharper In some 
cases than others, Dudley rose, dressed silently 
and quickly; and noiselessly, without a glance at 
the supreme loveliness that had conquered him 
over-night, went downstairs, and Into the draw- 
ing-room. 

He felt he must get away. He drew his chair 
to her writing-table, and sitting down, wrote 
rapidly In the white morning light. When he had 
finished, he put the letter Into an envelope, ad- 
dressed It to his wife, and set It in front of the 
little clock he knew she always wound the first 
thing on reaching her table. She could not fall 
to find the letter there. Then he left the room, 
descended to the hall, put on his hat and coat, 
unbarred the door and let himself out. The 
square was white and misty-looklng In the early 
light. He crossed It quickly and walked straight 
to Violet’s house. He had never been able to 
force himself to occupy It or stay long In It when 
he had believed her dead. But now It could have 
no sadness for him, and It would only be a joy 
to live In It, w^here she had lived, until some time 
when she might come again to her own. 

It was very quiet In the street. The Park looked 
fresh In Its tender and early green. There was 
no one moving. He let himself In with the latch- 
key that he always carried with him, and closed 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


96 

the door gently, so as not to wake the old care- 
taker who slept below. He had given orders that 
the door was never to be barred, so that he could 
always get in with his latch-key when the fancy 
took him. He went up the stairs to the bedrooms. 
They were kept clean and dust free, practically 
ready for occupation, just as she had left them. 
Everything without condition or reservation 
had passed to him by her will, and his fancy 
had been, as if guided by some instinctive uncon- 
scious knowledge of the facts, to keep everything 
untouched as if in trust for her. 

Now as he went quietly up the stairs, joy welled 
into his heart to think his fancy had guided him 
so truly. It was all in trust for her till she should 
return. 

How different this visit from all his former 
ones, when every room had seemed to cry to him 
with an agonised voice, when his feelings had 
reached such an agony of longing for her, that 
when the business of his visit was over he had to 
escape from the house, his heart cold within him 
and his eyes blind with tears. 

On the landing upstairs, he did not turn into the 
front room, but into the smaller one at the back, 
which Violet herself had always occupied. The 
front bedroom, the best and largest and most 
sunny in the house, had been given — as the best 
was always given — to her mother, and in this 
hung the portrait of the most beautiful woman, 
to whom Violet’s life had been dedicated, and 


REGRET 


97 

for whose sake now, Violet had gone over the 
edge of the world. 

Dudley entered Violet’s room, and there in the 
low cane chair, in the white stillness of the early 
day, he sat down alone. 

He was bitterly annoyed with himself for his 
weakness of the previous evening. He wanted to 
escape from his present existence, and it semed to 
him now he had linked his fetters anew about his 
neck. Perhaps it is only the utterly callous in this 
life who are ever free. Those who consider the 
rights and wishes of others move perpetually in 
chains. It is very seldom Indeed that one can 
stretch out one’s hand for anything in this life, 
without knocking down something of value to 
others. 

Dudley sat there raging against himself, which 
is the most exhaustive form of anger. To be angry 
with oneself — ^wlth oneself that one yet does not 
want to injure, nor to punish! It Is a hopeless, 
heart-breaking feeling. Yesterday morning he had 
been, morally, more free than he was this morn- 
ing. Denny’s death had been a crime on his wife’s 
part that to some extent justified the sentence of 
banishment from his life that he had wished to 
pass on her. But now he had appeared to condone 
the crime, and the criminal might with justice ask 
for a reprieve. 

The feeling that he had in a sense been faithless 
to the woman he really loved also troubled him 
here In these sacred precincts, which spoke so 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


98 

audibly of her to him, but this, as usual with a man, 
this ethical question, troubled him far less than 
what he foresaw might be the practical inconven- 
iences and difficulties raised by his own action. 

He had tried in his letter to put before his wife 
the advisability of giving him his freedom, but 
he knew how much more decisive that letter might 
have been if her victory over his senses had not 
Immediately preceded It. He sat through all this 
early morning, gnawed at by remorseless thought 
and regrets, as so many men have done since the 
world began, longing to recall the actions of the 
dark and vanishing hours of the night. 

At eight o’clock he descended to the dining- 
room and rang the bell. The old caretaker, accus- 
tomed to his surprise visits, appeared without 
either astonishment or displeasure on her face, 
received his orders for breakfast, and vanished 
to obey them, after having raised the blinds and 
opened a window to the joyous sunny spring- 
scented morning. 

After breakfast a taxi came up to the door 
bringing one of the maids from his house In the 
square, and his kitbag with a note from Bertha. 
He opened it and read simply these few words: 

“It seems unkind to go away like this after 
last night. However, I send your things as you 
ask, and hope you will come to see me in a little 
while when you feel rested and better for the 
change. — Bertha.” 

His brows contracted as he read: “After last 


REGRET 


99 


night.” iYes, Aat had been his mistake. The 
note, by its very submissiveness, seemed to put 
him in the wrong. He scribbled a word of thanks, 
and sent the note back by the maid. Then he 
directed his bag to be put in the back bedroom, 
told the caretaker he should be sleeping there 
that night and leaving for the country the follow- 
ing day, and then took his hat and went out. 


CHAPTER IV 

HAPPINESS 

The next morning he left Paddington Station 
with its crowd of varied figures moving spectre- 
like through the muffling folds of a London Spring 
fog, and with a sense of thankful relief in his heart 
started back to Newquay. The carriage though 
first class, was crowded to suffocation with people 
who had mostly only paid third class fares, and 
it struck him as a curious illustration of England’s 
deterioration that these inferior, dirty, and ill 
mannered persons should thrust themselves into 
seats for which they had not paid, and that the 
clean and decent occupants of the carriage should 
allow the injustice. To avoid being drawn into 
conversation with any one he armed himself with 
a substantial newspaper, and drawing himself 
back into his corner by the window, opened the 
news-sheet before his face, and thus secured a 
certain amount of peace and privacy. He could 
not read: a burning impatience to be at his jour- 
ney’s end filled him, and unsatisfactory and pain- 
ful and embarrased as his position was, his heart 
was loudly and triumphantly joyful, and his reason 
100 


HAPPINESS 


lOI 


made no attempt to check that joy. Dudley had 
had that almost unique experience of going 
through the loss of a loved object, and then re- 
lindlng It again. The agony and shock of the loss, 
and the ensuing misery of four years, had taught 
him now on Its recovery. Its Intense value, and 
that beside It all other surrounding circumstances 
mattered not at all. She was alive! That fact 
was so huge and wonderful, and It crowded his 
brain so with joy that no other thought or feeling 
could find place there. Behind his paper he 
rested his head back on the cushion, closed his 
eyes and reflected. He would not think of diffi- 
culties or troubles. He had made a great mis- 
take and was suffering for It, and would suffer 
he knew, but what was that In comparison with 
the great delight he had now. He shut resolutely 
those doors In his mind behind which was the 
Image of his town house, and the emotions he 
felt when living there. He saw only now with 
his mental vision the arched and glistening roof of 
the cavern, the flashing red of Its porphyry col- 
oured walls, the soft feather dresses, the bare feet, 
and flowing hair of Its occupant, and heard the 
music of the waves, and the call of the wheeling 
gulls, to the complete exclusion of the loud rough 
talking of the common and Ignorant crowd about 
him. He was so absorbed In delicious reveries, 
that It was with quite a shock of surprise he found 
that his train had already reached Exeter, and was 
at a standstill and some of his fellow passengers 


102 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


were stumbling over his feet, and pushing and 
elbowing their way out In the inconsiderate way 
characteristic of the lower classes. “Wake up, 
old son!” exclaimed a girl opposite him, who 
looked as If she should have been behind a coster’s 
barrow In the East End, “and let me tike my 
bundle.” She knocked away his paper, and 
nearly crushed In his hat, as she strained up to 
the rack to get her untidy looking package. 
Dudley escaped Into the corridor, and had the 
satisfaction of seeing his carriage nearly empty 
Itself. When the train started again he retook 
possession of his corner, and gazed out of the 
window. It was raining furiously, and he saw 
the trees of the passing landscape lashed and 
bent by the wind. He could reach Newquay at 
dusk; It would be a cold swim out to the cavern, 
he realized. If the storm continued, but he felt 
he must get to her that night even In the face of 
black and raging water. The whole time he had 
been away In London, he had been annoyed, 
vexed. Irritated, wounded. In the cavern he 
knew waited him perfect peace quiet and calm, 
and he seemed to long after those things as a 
man In the desert longs after water. Yes, he 
would go without any delay, except that Involved 
by leaving his bag at the station, and dining at 
the hotel before starting. That he felt he must 
do. He had not yet reached the stage of natural- 
ness where he could exist, as Violet did, on mussels 
and seaweed. She would serve him those for 


HAPPINESS 


103 


breakfast in the cavern he knew, but he thought 
he had better secure dinner at the Victoria over 
night. 

The weather grew worse and worse, and by the 
time they reached Newquay It was a driving 
hurricane. As he stepped out on the platform, 
the wild salt wind, laden with the breath of the 
sea, struck his face, but It brought only exhilara- 
tion to his mind. The long dangerous swim to be 
faced did not appal him. When either great 
grief or great joy has taken possession of our 
inner soul, we are ruled by that entirely, and out- 
side circumstances do not matter at all. They 
have no power over us as they have when our 
emotions are in a moderate state. Violet, on the 
night she had walked to meet death along the 
cliffs, had been Indifferent to the fury of the storm, 
lifted by her grief to a sphere where only grief 
could dwell, and now Dudley wrapped In his 
joyful anticipation was equally inaccessible to Its 
clamour and its rage. After dining at the hotel, 
he pushed his cap well down over his ears, 
fastened his overcoat and then went from the light 
and shelter of the hall through the glass doors 
out into the shrieking blackness of the night. His 
heart was warm within him. All his thoughts 
sang. When he reached the open country and 
turned off the high road on to the top of the cliffs, 
the wind was terrific and the rain lashed Into 
his face and stung his eyelids. Far below him 
he could hear the sea thundering Into Its caverns 


104 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


with a roar like the booming of big guns, and for 
several minutes the current of his thoughts bore 
him back to the nights of the war when he sought 
Death again and again in the open plain, but 
sought in vain, just as the girl had sought and 
offered herself to Death, and also been rejected. 
But he would not let himself dwell on that time 
of terror. A time when all the horror round him 
had been nothing to the devastating pain within. 
He kept his mind on the present, and what lay 
immediately ahead of him. In fact, he had good 
cause to. It was difficult to find and keep on the 
narrow trail by the cliff edge, and he strained 
his ears to catch the exact sound of the waves 
below. By that he could estimate the height of 
the tide and his chances of being able to swim 
to the cavern. The tide was not at the full, of 
that he could be sure : it was out some way on 
the sands, and if still going down, then all would 
be well. He had about six miles to walk, and the 
tide, if well down now, might be at its lowest, and 
very much calmer, by the time he reached the 
point where he would have to take to the water. 
He pressed on as fast as the miry ground and the 
wind battering on his side as it came in from due 
North, straight from the face of the ocean, per- 
mitted, listening intently to the voice of it all the 
time. It seemed to him its tone was growing less 
clamorous and farther away. When he came to- 
Watergate Bay where the cliffs are broken by a 
deep ravine running down to the shore, he saw, as 


HAPPINESS 


105 


the wind tore the clouds aside from the stars for a 
moment, the wet sands lying out rolled and all 
glimmering before him. With a heart-bound of 
delight he turned his face seawards and hurried 
down the steep stony decline, and then the shaky 
wooden steps, and reached the well-remembered 
sands. The tide was far out, the wind was drop- 
ping, the rain fell heavily but straight, not in 
angry squalls and gusts. He saw that his swim 
would be possible, and even In a moderate sea. 
The temporary starlight was blotted out, but he 
went forward joyfully In the thick darkness. 
Every now and then he splashed violently Into a 
pool, and sometimes collided with a rock, if he 
strayed in the blackness too near to the cliffs, but 
on the whole Fortune favoured him, and It did 
not seem long before he had rounded the first 
promontory with Its sharp outcrop of rocks, and 
its network of pools, and got into the cove beyond, 
then the next and the next great black ridge had 
been passed, and he was at the sacred promontory, 
which led to the still more sacred cavern and to 
her. 

The storm had abated now, there was a little 
glimmer of starlight. He climbed eagerly up the 
side to a point above high water mark, where he 
hastily stripped off all his clothing, and rolling It 
together rammed It securely between two rocks. 
In that wild, desolate and little known spot It 
would be safe till he claimed It again: boots and 
all were stowed into the cliff. Then, clad only In 


io6 OVER LIFE’S EDGE 

his bathing suit, a strong warm one that reached 
from his neck to knees, he climbed cautiously along 
the headland towards the sea. Cold though the 
air was the going was so rough and difficult he had 
no sense of chill I every muscle was used to its 
utmost as he crept along in the darkness over the 
slimy seaweed-covered slabs, and round the sharp 
and jagged edges of the rocks. It was a relief at 
last when he came to the deep water, and though 
he could see it foaming white in the darkness, as 
it curled against the steep and rocky side, still he 
knew he had often swum in rougher seas. With 
a strong leap from the rocks to clear the surf near 
the side, he plunged into the sea. It was Icy In 
its feeling as it closed above his head, but he was 
thoroughly warm with the tension of that last walk 
down the promontory, and he hardly noticed the 
grip of the water. He swam quickly, making a 
wide detour to avoid the dangerous current. He 
struck out well towards the open, and then turned 
back approaching the cavern on its safer side. 
The water was now some way below the floor of 
the cavern, as it rarely reached much above its 
level even In the highest tides, and he had to let 
a great swell of the sea bear him up to the cliff 
face. Then with a huge effort he clung on to a 
projecting ledge, and drew himself rapidly out of 
the clinging, pull-back of the water. A few vio- 
lent scrambles for foothold and handhold and he 
was up ! 

The great cavern entrance rose before him! 


HAPPINESS 


107 


He crawled forward, and was within Its stately 
quiet. The wind blew and the rain splashed, and 
the water swirled without, but here was safety 
and calm. All was silence. He stood upright: 
passing his hands down from his shoulders over 
his chest, pressing the water out of his bathing 
suit. A great sense of elation came over him, a 
delight In his physical strength and powers that 
had brought him here, a joy In all the force that 
had enabled him to accomplish the journey. He 
looked up, but the darkness was so thick, so 
velvety, his eyes could not pierce It. There was 
not the faintest light. The feeble starlight that 
had flickered on his path outside did not enter the 
cavern. 

“Violet,” he called softly. Instantly there was 
a rustle of feathers like the stirring of a large bird 
above him. 

“Is that you, Dudley?” came her voice from 
above him In the blackness. 

“Yes, I came down from town to-day, and have 
now swum out to find you. Are you up there In 
bed on your ledge?” 

“Yes, I was asleep, but Pm worried about you. 
You must be frightfully cold. Have you any 
clothes on?” 

“Only my bathing suit.” 

“Well, take It off at once, and rub yourself all 
over with the sand. When you are dry Pll throw 
you down one of my feather coats; that will wrap 
you up and keep you warm.” 


io8 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


Dudley’s teeth were beginning to chatter: now 
that the struggle was over, nature began to assert 
Itself and warn him that he was tired and cold. 

He stripped off his bathing suit as she de- 
manded, and rubbed himself vigorously with the 
dry shell sand all over. Its prickly stinging touch 
on the skin soon brought back warmth to the 
surface. 

“Are you quite dry?” came the anxious voice, 
falling on his head from above in the blackness. 

“Yes, quite dry and warm now.” 

“Well then, catch!” and down came a soft 
fluffy bunch of feathers all warm with soft human 
warmth. It was very welcome, and Dudley found 
the string at the neck and slipped it willingly over 
his head. The garment fell round him like a 
carter’s smock frock. It was short for him, reach- 
ing only to his knees, but delightfully warm. His 
arms could pass out through the feathers at each 
side. “That’s famous! I’m quite warm and fixed 
up altogether. Now may I come upstairs please ?” 

There was a soft laugh overhead. He felt she 
was looking down upon him over the edge of her 
rock bed. 

“Well, I expect you will be cold down there, so I 
suppose you must, but if you come up, you must 
promise to be very good and to go to sleep at once, 
and be just as we were that night when we camped 
out and had to sleep on the ground under a wagon 
sheet. Do you remember?” 

“I remember.” 


HAPPINESS 


109 

“Well, is it a bargain? No kissing or anything 
like that?” 

“Mayn’t I have a good-night kiss?” 

“No, not one.” This was in a very firm tone, 
and a coldness had come into the voice that he 
knew well. 

“Well, I promise on my honour,” he answered. 

“Then I trust you. You may come up. Do 
you remember the steps ?” 

“Yes, quite well.” 

He started to ascend the tiny niches in the wall 
at the back of the cavern which she called steps. 
How madly happy he was ! Even without the all- 
dominating love and passion in his heart, the mere 
strangeness, the wild adventure of it all would 
have pleased his enquiring artistic brain beyond 
everything, and with that great love flaming 
within him the cavern seemed to be aglow in all 
its walls with light and glory. 

As he reached the top stair she called to him 
again: 

“Now be careful, get well back on the ledge 
close to the wall. It’s easy to fall over the edge.” 

He was on the ledge now. Obeying her instruc- 
tions he went forward till he touched the wall, then 
he crept along by it till he reached the great mass 
of feathers that made her bed. The next instant 
he was beside her. The warm soft feathers were 
all about his feet. 

“Better lie on the Inside next the rock,” came 


I lO 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


her voice out of the dark, “or you might fall off in 
your sleep. I’ll go nearer the edge.” 

He heard the feathers rustle as she moved, mak- 
ing space for him. He sank down on his hands 
and knees, and the warmth and softness of the 
couch enfolded him. Waves of ecstatic pleasure 
flowed through him: joy like some intoxicant 
seemed mounting to his brain. 

“Darling, It is heaven to be with you at last! 
What would you do If I broke my promise and 
took you in my arms and kissed you ?” 

“Don’t be stupid, Dudley, you know an English 
gentleman couldn* t break his promise,” she re- 
turned, and her trust in him was evidently so 
simple, so absolute, so profound, that It would 
have made the Impossibility she spoke of, even 
had It not existed. 

“Now are you warm and comfortable?” she 
went on, stretching out one arm, and her soft, salt- 
scented palm came down flat on his face In the 
darkness, and they both laughed. “Have you 
room enough?” 

“Yes, quite; I am In heaven. I never was In 
such a lovely bed before,” he answered stretching 
himself out. Their bodies did not touch. There 
was plenty of room for them both, side by side, on 
the ledge, but the warmth from hers radiated out 
to him throug'h the feathers, and stole through 
every nerve and fibre of him, filling him with in- 
expressible delight. 

Had such circumstances been described to him. 


HAPPINESS 


III 


he would have laughed at the Idea of falling asleep 
in them, but in reality now, after his nerve racking 
sojourn in town, the long railway journey, the 
many mile walk battling with wind and rain along 
the miry cliff, and finally the plunge into the Icy 
water, and the long cold swim, after these coming 
suddenly into the soft warmth of this fairy couch, 
physical weariness, so long staved off by the knowl- 
edge of effort before him, now that all effort 
for the present was over, claimed him for Its own, 
and he put his head down, stretched out his tired 
limbs with a delicious sense of repose and relaxa- 
tion, and in a few moments fell asleep. 

The girl sat up and piled more feathers over 
him, then, when she had satisfied herself he was 
completely covered, she turned over on her side 
and relapsed into the slumber he had broken in 
upon. She remembered years ago when they and 
other men and women in the same camping party 
had all taken shelter from the blizzard beneath 
fhe waggon sheet, and had lain side by side that 
the tarpaulin might cover them all, how she had 
lain awake and thought under other circumstances, 
she would like his protective arms round her. Ah, 
how light and gay, singing as a bird within her, 
had been her heart then, quickening with its fire 
her gay Irresponsible senses! Now here in the 
midnight silence of the cavern, remote from all 
censure and enquiry, she found herself again beside 
this ardent beautiful living frame, full of the same 
deep passion as always for herself. But now her 


1 12 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


heart was seared Into nothingness and all her 
senses silent, and she slipped back gladly into the 
black unconsciousness he had disturbed. 

As the night went on, more and more stars 
reflected themselves in the Atlantic mirror, and 
when the dawn came, it rolled back the last cloud 
curtain from a sky of the fairest most tender blue. 
A light delicate mist hovered over the sea and 
rocks, veiling the coast and the lofty outlines of the 
cliffs, and as the rose flush In the East deepened, 
all this tremulous vapour was illuminated with 
pink light until every object seemed blushing and 
glowing behind opaline veils. Here and there, as 
the current of the breeze bore the mast wreaths 
hither and thither, the surface of the ocean showed 
in broad tracts swelling and heaving but calm like 
oil on the surface, and of a deep and wondrous 
turquoise hue. 

Inside the cavern as the first light stole In, the 
girl awoke and opened her eyes. As now she 
went to bed and to sleep always with the darkness, 
so she woke with the light. Little need would 
there be for oculists to meddle with Nature’s 
masterpiece — the eye — if all men and women did 
the same. Immediately the events of the previous 
night came back to her, as Is the wonderful way 
of the brain. After long hours of unconscious- 
ness sometimes peopled by the strangest dreams, 
yet on awakening, every little happening before 
we slipped into the gulf of sleep, is there, clear. 


HAPPINESS 


113 

distinct In our consciousness needing no effort to 
recall It to our memory. 

Violet sat up on the stone ledge and looked 
down on her companion. In the pale twilight of 
the cave, she could see his dark handsome head 
outlined against the white feathers, the strong 
round neck, and the graceful lines of his should- 
ers, as he slept. She looked down upon him 
calmly, quietly, from under her long-lashed lids, 
and wondered at herself. She felt neither pleased 
nor displeased that he was there. She just felt — 
nothing. How long grief can draw a sponge 
across the brain leaving It all bare, black slate ! A 
tender little smile curved her lips as she looked at 
him; he appeared so frankly comfortable and at 
ease. 

She rose silently from his side, and with dainty, 
cautious steps passed over him and down the 
rock niches to the cavern floor. Going to the en- 
trance she looked out on her world of splendour 
of which she never tired. 

The sun was rising now and Its flashing glory 
broke over the water, tingeing everything with 
fiery red and gold, the drifting masses of semi- 
transparent rose-hued mist dissolved rapidly be- 
fore It, leaving the swaying turquoise plain of the 
ocean free to reflect unclouded the pale seraphic 
blue of the sky. A breath of the lightly stirring 
morning breeze came to her. It seemed like the 
breath of life itself, so fresh and pure, charged 
with the iodine salts and the vitalising mysterious 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


114 

fragrance of the sea. The surface of the water 
was still not quite level with the cavern floor; it 
swayed gently against the rock face some two feet 
below. She came over the threshold and with 
quick, agile feet climbed the rocks beside the en- 
trance, towards the top of the headland. It was 
an hour later when Dudley awoke. His first im- 
pulse was to stretch out his arm towards his com- 
panion, and finding her place empty he immediately 
rolled into it and looked over the edge. The 
cavern was full of warm light now, still rather 
pink and rosy, beyond the entrance was a world of 
blue, and against this he saw the figure of the girl 
clothed in her white feather suit, the yellow gold 
mass of her hair smooth on her head and falling 
in orderly waves and ripples down her back. She 
was seated on the sand before the flat-topped rock 
that made her table. Her round arms, coming 
through the feathers without sleeves, were sweetly 
tinted by the soft enchanted light. She was set- 
ting out the things on her hospitable board, and 
Dudley saw her breakfast consisted of a shell of 
clear water, a heap of periwinkles, a pile of laver 
seaweed, some mussels, and two gull’s eggs. 

Most men would have had longing visions of 
steaming coffee and jugs of white milk, fried soles, 
reposing under silver covers, and shining racks 
filled with toast. But in these things the artist 
has the advantage over ordinary man. Novelty 
will always console him for custom; beauty for 
material things. 


HAPPINESS 


As Dudley hung over the edge above looking 
down upon the scene, the novelty of it all delighted 
him far more than the glint of substantial covers 
on a damask cloth, and there was so much beauty 
in it, not only In the girl’s form, but in the whole 
cavern, such a glory of rich colour, such a harmony 
of fairy light, that he honestly would not have 
traded the meal he saw had been prepared for 
him, for the finest mundane breakfast he had ever 
had. 

“Aurora, darling! How lovely you look!” he 
exclaimed. “I must paint you like that. Oh, 
Violet! What a picture. Just think of It. 
‘Aurora at home,’ w^e might call it.” 

The girl looked up and laughed. “Oh, you’re 
awake then. Come down when you like. There’s 
nothing hot so you needn’t hurry because it’s 
getting cold! I’m afraid you won’t like your 
breakfast a bit, but I’ve done the best I could; 
I’ve been collecting it for an hour.” 

“How awfully good of you. It looks most In- 
viting.” He got up, stroked his feathers down 
all round him so as to present a well-tolletted 
appearance, and sprang down the little steps, and 
took his place opposite her. 

He looked very handsome after his long sleep, 
with his wide dark eyes full of smiles as he gazed 
upon her She put the gull’s eggs before him. 

“Take these first, as they are more like civilised 
food,” she said, and she watched him break the 


ii6 OVER LIFE’S EDGE 

tops off the eggs carefully, and swallow them with 
appreciation. 

“Delicious!” he said, and they really seemed 
s>o. “But I am afraid you’ve given yours to me.” 

“It doesn’t matter. I’ve had heaps of mussels. 
Try your periwinkles.” 

Dudley did so; he ate the whole pile with evi- 
dent pleasure. “The first time I’ve ever had them, 
but I’ve often heard about costers liking them. 
No wonder. What a lovely cup,” he said, taking 
up the shell. “Beautiful tea,” he added, as he 
set it down empty beside him., ^‘Is It Darjeeling 
or Assam?” 

Violet laughed. 

“It’s a good rain-water blend. It comes from 
the garden of Jupiter Pluvius,” she answered. 

So they joked all through the meal and between 
them cleared every morsel from the rock table. 

Dudley was amazed to find the satisfaction and 
the stimulant to be obtained from the shell-fish 
and seaweed. He felt as if he had had a break- 
fast of mutton chops and China tea. 

“One perfectly glorious thing about uncivilised 
life,” the girl said as they were finishing, “Is that 
one gets away from punctuality. Oh, how I’ve 
hated that very word and the vile slavery It stands 
for In civilised life. The master of the house for- 
sooth when the sound of the dinner gong comes 
smashing through the house, has to rush and hurry 
over whatever he Is doing as if he were a wretched 
menial, and as for the mistress and all other mem- 


HAPPINESS 


117 

bers of the household, they have to sit or stand 
about doing nothing in the vicinity of the dining- 
room that they may be able to dart in the moment 
the bell sounds. Half an hour before each meal 
they have to waste loitering about afraid to engage 
in anything lest It should make them unpunctual. 
Here, time is all loose, as it were; no fixed bands 
round it, such as nine o’clock, five o’clock, and 
eight o’clock. There is lots of It, limited only by 
light and dark, and one can take great bunches of 
it and do what one likes with it.” 

‘‘Yes; only there Is not a terrible lot to do. Is 
there?” returned Dudley quizzingly, as he fin- 
ished his last mussel. “What have we got to do 
with this loose bunch, for instance, till we get 
hungry again?” 

Violet laughed. 

“If I were alone I should swim out to that little 
chain of islands you see out there to the east, 
it’s nine miles, and by the time I had swum out 
there, walked over the Island, had a mussel lunch- 
eon, and swum back here, I should be quite ready 
for a nap; but the lovely part is, there Is no need 
to come back, I can stay there all day If I like, 
and eat and sleep there. I can come back here in 
the middle of the night by starlight, or at dawn, 
or not at alll, just as the fancy takes me, but nine 
miles without a rest Is too far for you to swim 
as you can’t be In practice as I am.” 

“No, I couldn’t do nine miles, nor anything like 
that.” 


ii8 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


“Well, we’ll just swim along the shore and go 
up into the sandy coves, whenever you like, shall 
we ? And rest, and eat, and bask between swims ; 
would you like that?” 

“Yes, I think it would be very jolly.” 

“Have you anything you want to do in town? 
Don’t you want to go back there?” 

“No, I don’t think I need go back yet. My 
bag will be all right at the station. I kept my 
rooms on, so I can go back there any time, but 
I love being here with you.” 

She smiled. 

“I think you’ll have to go back to dinner and 
get some beef and Burgundy. I don’t believe 
mussel diet will suit you. You’ll get ill, and that 
would worry me dreadfully.” 

“I don’t want to go yet. We’ll enjoy this 
bunch of time first, anyway. Do you swim in that 
dress?” 

“No, I have my regular swimming suit; I keep 
this dress dry to put on when I come back. You 
get into your suit and I’ll do the same, and we’ll 
start.” 

She went from him as she spoke and walked up 
the rock stairs to her upper chamber, where he 
heard her moving over his head with rustling 
noises like a big bird. 

He went over to his own suit which was lying 
spread out on the sand where he had left it last 
night. It was still damp, and he did not enjoy 
changing the beautiful warmth of the feather suit 


HAPPINESS 


119 

for it. He had just completed the exchange 
when he saw the girl descending at the back of 
the cavern. The light was rushing In strongly now^ 
from the brilliant outside, and she made a wonder- 
ful picture against the dark background of rock^ 
What she called her “regular bathing suit” was a 
close fitting vest of soft small feathers, so deftly 
made and clasping her so closely that it almost 
seemed they were growing on her. The outlines 
of all her waist and breast were clear beneath 
their soft, rounding case of white down, her 
throat and arms from the shoulders, and legs 
from a little above the knee, were quite bare, and 
shewed delicate and a faint rose shell-llke pink in 
colour against the black rock wall. Her hair 
streamed in its light-filled ripples behind her; one 
little shell-pink hand was outspread against the 
dark wall beside her; one little ivory foot sought 
a lower stair. 

Dudley stood still, spellbound, gazing at her. 

“I expect I look rather like a girl in an Alham- 
bra Revue, don’t I?” she said as she reached 
the floor and came over to him. 

“Yes, perhaps a little, but I’ve never seen such 
a lovely scene on any stage. Oh, Violet, you dis- 
tract me. I see such perfect pictures I could 
make of you In this setting. I’m mad to get at 
my brushes and canvas again. ‘Aurora at Home,’ 
‘The Siren’s Cave,’ ‘The Rock Staircase.’ What 
a series for the Academy!” 

“The Academy would reject them all very 


120 OVER LIFE’S EDGE 

likely as being too original. Come now, are you 
ready?” 

“Quite,” he answered, and they both went over 
the threshold. The tide had risen and was now 
flush with the cavern floor. The pastel effect of 
the early morning was over. The sea was still, 
absolutely calm on the surface, but no longer 
turquoise. It was a deep, clear, radiant sapphire 
blue, exquisitely clean and transparent, so that 
the rock face against which it heaved and swelled, 
could be seen going down through it for a long 
distance, and where it lapped against the lip of the 
cavern and splashed over, it seemed like breaking 
crystal. The veils of mist were gone, the sunshine 
triumphant danced merrily over the sea, the sky 
above seemed arched at an enormous height, and 
was filled with small luminous white clouds. 

“How glorious this is. What a scene of life,” 
Dudley exclaimed as they stood for a moment 
looking at it all. Then they slid from the rock 
into the water easily and silently as two seals. 

What a wonderful joy it is to swim 1 That first 
moment of stretching out one’s arms to the water ! 
That first touch of it at one’s throat as it closes 
round! The sense of delight, of pleasure, of 
power, as each little rocking ripple meets the chest 
and is surmounted, and the body glides onward, 
onward over the crystal blue, borne up not so 
much by one’s own efforts as by that mysterious 
force in the buoyant element supporting one ! 

They swam in silence side by side for some 


HAPPINESS 


I2I 


time, wholly given up to the ecstasy of motion, 
the sun warm In their faces, the joyous tinkle and 
gurgle of the water In their ears, as it sped past 
them obeying the quick sweeping stroke of their 
limbs 

“Are you enjoying it?” she asked presently. 

“Immensely. One seems Master of Life and 
the World,” he answered, turning over to swim 
on his side so that he could see his companion 
better. The sun shone down on her fair head 
turning it to living gold; the water had not gone 
over her so that her hair was still dry and curling 
in little tendrils to every breeze, as far as the nape 
of her neck, where the sea took It for its own, and 
it floatd there in one long, dark trail behind her. 
She Imitated his movement and turned also on her 
side, one ivory arm shooting above her head, her 
rosy-hued cheek now nestling down to the deep 
blue water, which seemed to cradle her slight 
form and Dresden-china-like limbs affectionately 
in its long undulations. She was a perfect mis^ 
tress of the art of swimming, and one rapid, 
vigorous stroke would take her twenty-five feet, 
and then she would He outstretched for a moment 
waiting for him to overtake her with his more 
measured motion. In fact, her life In the water 
and constant practice had given her extraordinary 
confidence and power. She seemed not so much 
in it, nor on it, but of it, a part of It, as a ripple 
or a wave. 

It seemed Impossible that she could ever sink 


122 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


under it, or be dismayed by it. She had become a 
portion of it — its power, its buoyancy, its life. 
She sported and gambolled, and twisted, and 
turned by Dudley’s side, and turned a complete 
somersault in the water, smoothly, silently, with- 
out a splash, and then subsided into it altogether 
without sound or motion, so that he could not 
see her anywhere, until looking downwards he 
descried her far beneath him, swimming under 
water, gliding rapidly along in the clear sapphire 
depths. 

After what seemed to him a long time, he saw 
her dart upwards, and her head, now dark and 
smooth with dripping water, appeared beside him 
It came through the surface, dividing it, seemingly 
without breaking it, and she moved on beside him 
like an accompanying wave, without even an 
audible in-drawn breath. To swim thus is a 
wholly magic art indeed, hardly to be called by 
the same name as the convulsive, jerky, noisy, 
gasping, struggling progress of the average 
human being in the sea. 

Dudley also was a good and very powerful 
swimmer if a less unconventional one, and to be 
in the ocean on a morning like this was pure joy, 
even without the passionate delight he had in his 
lovely companion. 

“You have ceased to be a girl now; you are a 
wave,” he exclaimed. 

“I have become one, I think, after four years 
in the sea,” she answered laughing. She was 


HAPPINESS 


123 


swimmlag tranquilly now with the ordinary 
breast-stroke and only the length of their out- 
stretched arms away. 

‘‘Is this better than walking down Bond Street, 
or sitting In your arm-chair at Brooks’s?” 

“It is better — for us. But one must be fitted 
for It. Some people can’t swim.” 

“They can learn.” 

“Not always; it needs great strength and 
endurance.” 

They swam on In silence for a few minutes. 
They had kept out the full length of the headland 
away from the shore. Now Violet began to turn 
In towards It. 

“The coast Is quite deserted here; we might go 
and rest a little in some sunny cove.” Two or 
three powerful strokes brought them Into shal- 
lower water, and soon they could see the sand be- 
neath them, all patterned over with gold as the 
sunlight filtered down to it. A few moments more 
and their feet touched solid ground. Through 
calm water, and then through little ripples, they 
walked up towards the dry, sparkling sand, near 
the cliffs. The coast here was deeply Indented 
with bays, and where they stood now was a 
sheltered spot, with great walls of rock standing 
out each side of them, as the arms of an arm-chair. 
All the way up they were spangled with white 
gulls sitting on every little ledge, or projection, 
in twos, and rarely, one by Itself. They were 
resting in the sun and hardly moved or took any 


124 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


notice when the figures below came and stretched 
themselves on the strand. 

“We shall soon be dry here. How hot the sun 
Is,” she said shading her eyes with her hand, as 
she lay back and let her eyes wander up the cliff, 
noting each snowy, reflective pair of birds perched 
there, till her gaze reached the tufted cornice of 
grass fringing the upper edge and lost itself In the 
sunny azure of the sky. The small white clouds 
were still studded all over it dazzling In their bril- 
liant luminosity, clouds that mean not shadow, 
but increased Intensity of light. It was very still 
and beautiful In the cove, and the heat came down 
upon them from every side, reflected from the 
cliff face and walls. Yet balancing the almost 
oven-like atmosphere, not thirty yards from their 
feet the sand was broken by small ridges of dark 
rocks, under, round, and between which lay gleam- 
ing pools of delicious coolness, dark and In deep 
shadow. 

Dudley lay with his face half burled in one out- 
stretched arm shielding his eyes from the glare 
of the sun. The warmth of it was delicious on his 
limbs, and it seemed to him that he wanted noth- 
ing better from life just then, than to be left In 
peace to bask there undisturbed on that sun-baked, 
silent shore. 

The girl lay, too, quite motionless and without 
speaking. He wondered what she was thinking 
of. He supposed ber thoughts were wandering 
wearily over the same old ground of sorrow, and 


HAPPINESS 


125 


he longed to say something to lead them away, 
but the sun seemed pouring a soporific influence 
over and through him, deadening idea and thought 
and stilling speech. 

Overhead skimmed swiftly and smoothly the 
gulls, talking amongst themselves with their many 
and varied love tones, for it was the mating sea- 
son, when Nature supplies them with many other 
notes beside their warlike or hungry scream and 
their plaintive mew. They laughed constantly 
with the most human laugh imaginable, and gave 
frequent little chuckles apparently of delight and 
satisfaction in the silence peace and glory of the 
bright and tranquil scene. One came down out 
of the golden air and alighted close to Dudley on 
a flat rock. It came gently as a feather falling, 
letting out Its little pink legs and feet as it neared 
the rock, and folding Its pale grey wings with 
reposeful dignity as it took its stand there. Dud- 
ley watched It without moving, thinking with what 
wonderful perfection Nature turns out her work. 
The bird seemed Incredibly larger now it was 
close to him than when In the air, and he studied 
its beautiful dignity of pose and its scheme of 
colouring with delight, the pure snowy white of 
its chest and throat, the warm soft grey of Its 
wings, and those little exquisite touches and points 
of colour that Nature always adds, like the cun- 
ning artist she is, to heighten her effects, velvety 
black tips to the pale grey wings, bright golden 
bill, and dainty rose-coloured feet. Could any- 


126 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


thing be a more perfect and charming combina- 
tion of tints, he thought, gazing at It as the bird 
stood nobly there with head held high, and his 
bright glancing eye surveying Dudley and the girl, 
the pools, the rocks and ever and again turning 
upwards to follow the flight of its gay com- 
panions. 

The gull is the embodied spirit of the sea, as 
the cuckoo Is of the woods. The absolute per- 
fection of it all strikes one when viewed close as 
Dudley was viewing it now, the dazzling spotless- 
ness of it, and the order of all those countless 
feathers, not one ruffled or awry, not the tiniest 
fleck of Imperfection anywhere on round white 
throat and breast, or smoothly folded wings, 
or polished beak, or pure pink foot. Living in 
wild Stony crags, perching on slimy seaweed-cov- 
ered rocks, battling with wind and driving rain, 
living Its life of rough storm and stress, it yet 
stood there In the sunlight Immaculate as a pearl 
taken from a jeweller’s casket. Wonderful magic 
power of Nature, wonderful force of life that she 
gives to her children to dominate all adverse cir- 
cumstances and conditions, and survive pure and 
untouched. It Is Man alone who through his 
villainy and stupidity sinks helpless In the slough 
of vice, sorrow, and disease. Full of conscious 
pride and power, delighting in all his latent force, 
the great gull looked this way and that, examining 
the two earth-crawlers before him with benign 
pity, and having satisfied himself that they had no 


HAPPINESS 


127 


means of reaching the airy nest on a pinnacle of 
rock far up the cliff, unfolded his magnificent 
glossy wings, rose and soared up into the blue. 

“Are you rested?” asked the girl presently, 
sitting up beside him. “If you are, we’ll have 
some luncheon, and then swim to Bedruthan Steps, 
I want you to see the rocks there.” 

“Luncheon. Ah!” Dudley could not help 
having a vision of cold chicken and game pie and 
a small bottle of Burgundy. He wished those 
things grew on the rocks instead of the endless 
mussel. It was all so lovely here, he would not 
give it up for anything, but he had not reduced his 
appetite to the point which the girl had, that 
made eveiy^thing so easy and simple. He sat up, 
too, and assented to her suggestion both to lunch 
and visit the Steps in the afternoon, and watched 
her while she went off to the rocks to gather 
the seaweed and shell-fish. She declined his help, 
saying he trod on the seaweed and spoiled it. So 
he was only too glad to sit still and watch her 
flitting over the rocks and pools with her slim and 
shining feet. 

This was a rest cure in truthful reality, and he 
laughed as he thought of the dark prison houses in 
London, the nursing-homes which advertise these 
words. He thought of their fetid atmosphere, 
both moral and actual ; the tramping steps of the 
hurried doctors, the whispering and giggling of 
the gossiping nurses, the dark narrow rooms with 
outlook on court and alley, the sickening scent of 


128 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


ether, and the appalling scent of death when those 
happily released were carried away. What a 
travesty on the words “home” and “rest.” How 
different from this silent, sun-soaked beach with 
the far-off musical murmur of winds and waves 
at play, and limited only by blue sea and sky. 
He would stay in it — stay and rest and be cured. 

When she came back, her arms full of shells 
and seaweed, and was seated beside him, he un- 
folded his plan. 

“I love this life, and I love being with you,” he 
said. “You can’t be so cruel as to drive me away 
from you, but I can’t live as you do. Let me buy 
a few things that I want and put them in that 
back part of the cave where the tide doesn’t reach, 
and I’d be so comfortable and content, I could 
settle down and live for ages like that.” 

“What sort of things?” 

“Oh, well, what I told you before: a spirit 
lamp and some tea and coffee, and some tinned 
meat and biscuits. You needn’t worry about cook- 
ing or anything. I’ll make the tea and coffee, 
and no one need know anything about It. I can 
bring whatever I want out from a cache on the 
beach without any fuss at all.” 

“It’s a great pity to go back to the dependence 
of civilisation.” 

^^You need not. / haven’t got away from It 
yet! I daresay I might In time.” 

The girl was silent. Whereas formerly she had 
been talkative and quick to take up any subject 


HAPPINESS 


129 


and discuss it and offer opinions upon it, now 
Dudley noticed she spoke far less often and rarely 
took up conversation in the gay, eager way of old. 
Things that had been Important were not import- 
ant now. When nothing matters, discussion and 
conversation are killed. At last, when they had 
finished their short, two-course luncheon, mussels 
and seaweed, she said: “Well, I give you carte 
blanche as to the cavern. Do anything you like. 
Only if you lead to its being discovered Pll never 
forgive you.” 

“I won’t, I promise you,” asserted Dudley joy- 
fully. “I’ll do everything by degrees; just swim 
out with the things I want, bit by bit. You’ll see 
it will be all right.” 

Violet did not reply, she sat with her arms 
round her raised knees, gazing before her, over 
the broad stretch of yellow sand, the ridge of 
rocks, the shining pools, to the dancing diamond 
sparkle and sapphire blue of the sea. He looked 
at her, her attitude now was one of perfect curves, 
the curve of her back and shoulders to the sand, 
the upward curve of her leg to the knee, the long 
sweeping curve of her round polished arms to the 
clasped hands, the curve of the little fair head 
against the blue, the curve of the pink and rounded 
cheek. He longed to take her in his arms and 
cover her with kisses, but he knew that would only 
bring about his dismissal from her side, and what 
he dreaded so much, her permanent vanishing 
from him. He had found her quite by chance. 


130 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


If she chose, she could easily hide away from him 
in the labyrinth of that thousand-caverned coast, 
through which he might wander for ever without 
finding her again. This thought hung over him 
and closed round him like a sort of dread. Most 
human beings cannot disappear from life and from 
the gaze of those who know them, however much 
they wish to. The necessities of life itself hamper 
and fetter them, but she had conquered all ob- 
stacles and broken all fetters to life ; she was truly 
and absolutely free, mistress of herself and her 
own movements, and he had not the slightest 
thread to hold her by. He turned his eyes reso- 
lutely away from her, and fixed them on the shim- 
mering dark surface of the miniature lagoons be- 
tween the rocks. 

Presently she seemed to rouse herself from some 
deep reverie. 

“Would you like to swim along the coast to 
Bedruthan Steps now?” she asked turning to him 
with a little smile in her eyes. 

“I’m ready,” he answered, springing up, and 
they went down the blazing strand, that burnt 
under their feet, to the cool of the wet and gleam- 
ing sand. It was very quiet and lonely, with an 
absolute loneliness that gave Infinite peace. They 
might have been the first and only human beings 
in the world on that solitary, shining shore. The 
sea that morning was of an Intense and ever- 
varying colour. Far away on the horizon lay a 
fog bank, a soft and fleecy roll, and from this, 


HAPPINESS 


131 

thin light veils of transparent vapour, caught by 
the breeze, would be whirled at intervals across 
the sun, would waver, and flicker, and pass, and 
hurry on to be swallowed up in the blue, and as 
these filmy veils floated across the sun’s face, the 
surface of the sea would be swept by shadows and 
lights in colour, now turned to the lightest, palest 
green, then, as the mist wreath passed, this vivid 
green would be swept onwards, pursued by a rush 
of deepest ultramarine, and where it caught up 
the flying emerald tint, the two would merge and 
form a deep and glorious peacock blue, and as the 
mists passed over, and the sun shone clear of them 
again, the whole face of the sea would forget its 
emerald and ultramarine, and change swiftly back 
to the purest azure, and so on, like children at 
play, the hues and tints and shades played and 
danced and leapt over the waters in unison with the 
whirling skifts of vapour in the sky. 

The two stood looking at the miracle of light 
and colour on the sea, for a moment. 

‘‘This is my playground, picture-gallery and 
music-room combined,” she said laughing, as they 
slid softly into the water and glided on their way. 

It took them some hours, swimming by easy 
stages and pausing occasionally to rest, to reach 
that wide, impressive bay, with its clean-swept 
sandy strand, on which stand, huge and lonely, 
the colossal masses of rock which the tireless 
waves have detached from the cliffs In the labour 
of countless years. Wide, empty, deserted, gor- 


132 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


geously alone in its splendour of golden sunlight, 
no sound or movement disturbed its serenity, ex- 
cept the gay talk of the flocks of gulls and ducks, 
and the ripple and murmur of the now in-flowing 
tide. In another two hours the sea would have 
taken the whole of the bay under itself, and its 
waves would be lapping hungrily at the cliffs. 
Not one inch, not the narrowest margin would be 
left for the wayfarer’s foot, of all that firm and 
solid expanse. 

They approached from the Western side, and 
as the water was too shallow for swimming into 
the large cavern at the Western end of the Bay, 
they entered on foot, and went far into its darkest 
recesses. It was a perfectly formed cavern, with 
a symmetrically-arched roof, and spacious floor 
and wide, even opening looking Eastward. At the 
moment when they reached it both sides of the 
entrance were in the sea, and its ripples flowing 
far into the dark interior. Each ripple was shin- 
ing gold in the light of the Westering sun as it 
moved towards the cavern, but once past that 
portal, darkness swallowed it up, and this, com- 
bined with the broad span of the great archway 
turned to the Atlantic, seemed to invest it with a 
sombre majesty. This cavern on the edge of the 
ocean seems to hold a mysterious and eternal vigil. 

They came out, and as the coast was utterly 
their own, decided as a rest from swimming, to 
walk along the bay. They stood now in a minor 
cove, small by comparison with the larger bay. 


HAPPINESS 


133 


but yet immense in its proportions, towered over 
by the cliffs three hundred feet high of precipitous 
rock and needing many, many steps to cross its 
level floor. They were but as little dots moving 
across this playground of Titans. As they passed 
the flight of steps cut in the face of the cliff, she 
pointed them out to him, and they passed on 
rapidly by the rock that looks like a mammoth hat 
placed brim downwards on the sand, past the huge 
Good Samaritan rock, towering majestically above 
the still lagoon of water at its foot, up to the 
Queen Elizabeth rock, where they both stood for 
a moment to admire this statue carved by the 
ocean. 

“The Atlantic is mistress of all the Arts,” she 
said to him as they stood near the base of the 
colossal figure of the Queen in all her royal robes, 
most faithfully reproduced in every detail, as truly 
cut by some freak of Nature, as if the hand of 
man had been responsible for every stroke. 

“You have heard its wonderful music in the 
night and seen its glorious pictures at sunset, and 
now, this is the sculptor’s art. This is one of 
the Atlantic’s statues. It’s wonderful, isn’t it? 
It’s quite as real and true to life as those great 
statues the Egyptians carved in the rock at Abu 
Simbel. Do you remember the night we sat on 
the deck of the dehabyeah in the moonlight and 
looked at them on the bank of the Nile?” 

“I remember perfectly. I wanted you to kiss 
me, and you wouldn’t.” 


134 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


“How could I with all those other couples just 
on the other side of the awning? You were al- 
ways so unreasonable.” 

“Well, there are no couples here on any side 
of the awning,” he said, looking down on her 
and laughing. “Kiss me now.” 

“No,” she said turning away. “I have done 
with kisses.” 

“Nonsense! You have never begun.” 

They walked on in silence, leaving that miracle 
of the waters, the gigantic sitting figure of the 
Queen, behind them, the sun rays, gold on her 
regal brow, and the little singing ripples creeping 
in toward her feet. 

“Now this is the part I specially wanted to show 
you,” she said presently, as they neared the East- 
ern end of the great Bay, “this glorious arch like 
an enormous Arc du Triomphe. Isn’t it beauti- 
ful? unequalled in its own particular beauty?” 

Dudley looked up. They had reached the end 
of the main curve of the Bay; here the cliffs ad- 
vanced outwards towards the sea, to recede again 
Immediately, making another deep cove beyond. 
Here, where they jutted forward, a gigantic 
fragment of cliff face stood alone, the tide at its 
flood rushed through behind it, joining by a nar- 
row lagoon of water shut in between the cliffs and 
,its detached portion, the little cove with the main 
Bay. But now the lagoon was empty and one 
could walk through the narrow gully, over the 
smooth-worn ledges of grey rock, and look 


HAPPINESS 


135^ 

througii the lofty, high-flung arch in the great 
detached fragment that made It, as she said, a 
veritable Arc du Triomphe, through which Giants 
on Mammoths might have ridden In state. 

She led him round by way of the smooth rock 
gully, and they paused, looking up at the stupen- 
dous arch in the golden light. It rose from a 
great shallow lagoon of still, green water, the 
surface of which now wavered gently as the little 
curling wavelets from the larger lagoon beyond 
began to ripple in through the archway. Here 
on this side all was shadow, cool greens and 
greys; but throug'h the great archway the ripples 
came In a stream of living gold from the shimmer- 
ing glory of the sun-lighted water beyond. Behind 
the dancing light one could see a spit of firm 
brown sand, stretching across, bounding and con^ 
fining the lagoon, and intervening between it and 
the blue of the open sea, on the edge of which 
curled tiny white waves but an inch or two- in 
height, and some of these, small though they were, 
would creep over the sand spit into the golden 
pool and Its surface would shiver, and it would 
send on in its turn, ripples through the arch to 
agitate the great slumbrous jade green lagoon. 

“I think this is simply wonderful, this place. 
I like It best of all, and yet the guide books and 
photos and pictures take no notice of it. Ages 
ago, when I was at Newquay once, I saw this 
arch and thought it lovely.’’ 

“It Is glorious.” 


136 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


“Come and swim about in the lagoon with me,” 
she said, sliding down from the flat rock on which 
she was seated, into the water. “It feels quite 
warm,” and she swam slowly from him, and he 
sat and watched her from his perch on a ledge 
of rock : her rosy-tinted arms turned to palest ivory 
beneath the deep jade green of the water, her hair 
dark In It floated a long trail behind her. Across, 
to one side of the arch, the pool grew shallow and 
a w'hite-pebbled shelving little beach had formed. 
She drew herself partly onto this, resting her 
elbows on it and her chin in her hand, the lower 
part of her body submerged. 

“Come over and play at alligators with me,” 
she called to him, “and we can watch the sunset 
from here through the arch.” 

He followed her, and they splashed and glided 
and sported like dolphins in the still shallow pool, 
while through the great archway, fit portal for a 
temple of the gods, came the amber ripples, glow- 
ing more golden, and lastly, tipped and crested 
with fiery red, as the sun sank lower towards the 
horizon. At last they seemed swimming In a lake 
of fire, so rich was the colour flung down from the 
painted sky, and the vast, empty, solitary Bay, 
stretching away on their right hand, became full 
of the blue and dusky shadows of evening. Soon 
the great lonely cove would be full of dancing 
turbulent water, and every silent cavern standing 
watching there, would be singing in a different 
yolce, some giving out great bass tones, others 


HAPPINESS 


137 


contralto and soprano notes, others again the 
purest treble, so the beach would be full of music 
and the sound of the great bell would peal down 
the lonely coasts with its magic melody of tone, 
haunting, insistent; a strange, wild melody, luring 
the foot to the sea. Soon the twin bays of Bed- 
ruthan Steps would be full, and the lagoon, where 
they swam at sunset, blended with the coves as 
the conquering waves came rushing in, in all their 
glorious panoply of colour under their gigantic 
triumphal arch. 

“Come,” she said, “it’s time for us to be leav- 
ing.” And, side by side, breasting the gold and 
crimson wavelets that broke gently against their 
throats, they swam under the arch and out over 
the sand spit, now deeply below die tide, out to 
the open sea. 


CHAPTER V 


ADVENTURE 

The sun was falling in a golden sheen on the 
cavern and on the narrow platform of rock before 
its threshold. It was low tide, so the green wa- 
ter swelled tranquilly against the rocks far be- 
neath. It was afternoon, and Nature seemed 
resting in placid serenity under the soft blue sum- 
mer sky. Even the gulls were silent and at rest, 
enjoying their hard-earned siesta, with their little 
ones. In the crannies of the cliffs. 

Dudley was lying on his chest, supporting his 
head between his hands, and his elbows on the 
sand that spread its sparkling whiteness in a thick 
layer over the rock shelf. 

He was smoking luxuriously and reading a 
book. He was dressed in a thin grey suit. In 
fact, it was obvious that he had embraced again 
that civilization which the girl had so completely 
freed herself from, and brought as much of it 
as he could into the cavern and his life there. 

Having found Violet again after those dreadful 
four years without her, it was quite impossible for 
him to tear himself away from her. He only felt 
138 


ADVENTURE 


139 


happy in her presence. All the unhappiness of the 
world, all the depression and misery one human 
being can possibly feel, seemed to live In the 
darkness of her absence, ready to spring out upon 
him and make him its prey directly he was away 
from her side. But deeply and all-absorbingly as 
he loved her, and happy as her dear companion- 
ship made him, he yet pined in the cavern for 
those ordinary realities of life from which she had 
shaken herself free so gladly, and with a man’s 
selfish tenacity of purpose where his own comfort 
and amusement are concerned, he worked to ob- 
tain them. Violet was sorry. She foresaw that it 
meant a loss of that glorious independence of 
place and circumstance which she now possessed, 
to go back to cooked food and manufactured 
clothes, but she was one of those very sunny, good- 
natured characters that loved seeing others happy, 
and since Dudley pressed so much for all this 
“comfort,” which did not appear tO' her as such^ 
she assented to his bringing In his tiresome spirit 
lamp, his parcels of provisions, his tobacco and 
clothes. The objects she resented least were his 
easel and artist’s materials. So now the cavern 
presented quite a different appearance, “much 
more comfortable” to his eyes, “not half so nice” 
to hers. 

Towards the back of the cavern there was an- 
other and higher stratum of rock, and over this 
floor the tide never came. Its jewel-coloured and 
sparkling water rippled and played and crept 


140 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


about the lower floor, all over the forepart of the 
cave, but the fine white sand of earlier times was 
never disturbed in the far interior, and here Dud- 
ley had set his spirit stove, supply of spirit, stores 
of tea, coffee, rice, flour, sugar, etc., his bottles 
of wine and spirit, tins of cigarettes, his paints, 
easel, and all the various other hampering, if 
delightful, toys of our earthly existence. Here, 
also, was his couch, a mass of gulls’ feathers laid 
on a rock shelf. The upper chamber. If so much 
it could be called, he left to Violet for her own. 

She had watched this change, this metamor- 
phosis of her home, with misgiving born of the 
free, untrammelled existence she had led for four 
years, but also with a certain Indifference, also 
child of those four peaceful but desolate years. 
And so their life had settled down on this 
slightly different basis. She retained her abso- 
lute aloofness from all this encroaching civiliza- 
tion, and used the cavern and its upper chamber, 
while he occupied, with his various trifles, the 
lower part, much as a man and a seagull might 
have shared It between them. 

And sometimes, when she had retired to her 
upper shelf, she would gaze down on him fussing 
over his stove, or cooking his supper, with bright, 
interested, yet aloof eyes, just as if she were, in- 
deed, a sea bird flown In to shelter there with him. 

Of course, it had all been done with the utmost 
secrecy and caution ; he had given his most solemn 


ADVENTURE 


141 

promise to do nothing to draw attention to her 
hidden dwelling. 

Bit by bit, tiny parcel by tiny parcel, he had 
brought the stores in with infinite patience and 
labour. He had been many weeks employed in 
this way, and he had looked upon it as a pleasant 
game or pastime, and had spent upon it all that 
painstaking loving care that an animal or bird 
will take in laying up a winter store, or building 
a nest. No labour is too great, no time too long, 
to expend upon a task we love, and Dudley, deeply 
interested as a beaver in building a dam, swam 
patiently backwards and forwards from cavern to 
shore, through moonlight nights and rosy dawns 
and golden evenings, choosing times when ob- 
servation of his movements was practically im- 
possible, with his loads packed in waterproof 
paper or mackintosh, sometimes held to his chest 
by one arm, while he swam with his legs and the 
other arm, sometimes pushed before him on a 
little wooden raft. The girl helped him willingly, 
though she would not get involved again in this 
sort of life. Instinct told her that it was possible 
Dudley might weary of the cavern and want to 
leave it and her. And to her, in her wild, inde- 
pendent state, in her life of large spaces and free- 
dom, his coming and his going would matter little, 
just as everything of the world mattered little 
now. Once let her share his life of mundane joys 
and work; once let her look to fires for warmth, 
to cooked food for sustenance, to wine for sup- 


142 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


port, it might be pleasant enough as a change 
just while he was there, but she would be giving 
up her independence, and if he decided to leave at 
any time she would be lost. She might not be 
able to resume that wonderful ability to live as 
she was now doing. She would be forced to 
accompany him back Into the world, or, perhaps 
die In the cavern. 

So they kept on their respective lines of human 
being and spirit, or seagull, and both were inno- 
cently content under the canopy of Heaven. He 
did not reach her spiritual heights of contempla- 
tion, her exalted rapture of the soul, nor did she 
share his many little delights of self-indulgence in 
hot meals, wine, smoking and the like, but between 
these two levels was a wide strip of companion- 
ship when they went out swimming together and 
frolicked and dived in the sunlit green of the sea, 
or when he painted either seascapes or herself, 
or when they talked long, long talks In the starry 
nights, seated by the cavern’s mouth. 

It was not a bad life, considering they were both 
partially maimed; not an altogether unhappy life 
for a girl with a broken heart In her breast, and 
a man just won free and deeply scarred from the 
horrors of war. 

They had made many long excursions up and 
down the coast: they had been again to Bedruthan 
Steps, and they had also established a little base 
on the distant islands. Choosing the longest and 
the largest Island of the group, a mere mass of 


ADVENTURE 


143 


rock rising out of the sea, Dudley had formed the 
idea of creating a comfortable camp there, and It 
gave him Interest and amusement to swim back- 
wards and forwards with similar “necessaries ” to 
those he had Introduced Into the cavern. There 
was a charming little cave there hollowed neatly 
out of a solid rock, and above the level of ordinary 
high tide. It was dry, sheltered, and warm Inside, 
for, though It faced the Atlantic, Its entrance was 
protected from wind and storm by the masses of 
loose rock that had fallen near the mouth. In 
fact, one might almost describe It as having a 
covered way up from the water, so thickly were 
the rocks piled about, and some had fallen to- 
gether at their summit, forming natural arches. 
Having come up to It, thus sheltered from any 
gale that might be blowing, one stepped over a 
rough threshold and then found oneself In a neat 
rock room, about large enough to have stored two 
bathing machines In. This was quite a find for 
Dudley, who immediately set to work to clear out 
all loose rock and debris from the Interior, leaving 
an unbroken, level floor, and after many subse- 
quent journeys and hard work, he had fixed up 
there a really good heat-gIvIng oil-stove, a can 
of oil, several stout cases of provisions, some wine 
and brandy, cigarettes, a good roll of blankets, 
with mackintosh to cover them and keep them dry, 
and heaps of little things, such as corkscrews, tin 
openers, matches, and many little odds and ends 
which he declared “might come In handy.” 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


!I44 

It is an odd fact that humanity dislikes work 
when it is called work, but if it can be dressed up 
to look like pleasure, humanity will embrace it 
cheerfully, and even pursue it with the utmost 
zeal. Dudley, in his delight over his discovery of 
the cave, and in his fancy for making it habitable, 
worked quite as hard and far longer hours every 
day than any miner at a coal face, and had this 
amount of exertion been demanded from him, or 
forced upon him by anything else than his own 
fancy, he would undoubtedly have called it slav- 
ery. Yet he swam backwards and forwards, 
weighted down and encumbered with all his stores, 
and rose early and slept late to complete his task 
with all the joy and light-hearted energy of a 
small boy building castles on the sand. 

Violet was amused and aloof, but as he seemed 
so thoroughly happy and interested in his self-ap- 
pointed tasks, she said no word against them, and 
rather welcomed his mundane desires, as the con- 
stant trips to the shops in the town they necess- 
itated left her free to spend long hours alone, as 
she loved to do. In the contemplation of the 
infinite. 

Everything was fairly complete now, and as 
Dudley said, they had their town house, by which 
he meant their porphyry-hued cavern on the pro- 
montory, and their bungalow, by which he meant 
the smaller cave on the Island, comfortably fur- 
nished. 

He kept on his rooms in Newquay because he 


ADVENTURE 


145 


was obliged to have some place for all his letters 
and his luggage, and he made a point of going 
there for a day or two fairly frequently that he 
might clear up his correspondence, answer all his 
letters, re-fit himself with any clothes he wanted, 
and also make his absence less conspicuous. As 
he had taken his easel with him, it was supposed 
he was at work on a picture, and for an artist to 
be painting and camping on that wonderful shore, 
in the dry and sunny spring weather, seemed rea- 
sonable enough. The last time he had been back 
to his rooms, he had found a letter from Bertha, 
which had saddened him, as all her letters did. 
It told him she had left their house and was going 
into a nursing home, and added: “I did not feel 
quite myself and Mamma wanted to take me into 
the country for a change, but Dr. Brown happened 
to call (you know he attended Denny), and in 
talking to him I got frightened. He seemed to 
think I had some interior trouble and suggested 
an exploratory operation, and then after that. If 
they find his diagnosis is right, I should have an- 
other operation to take out the colon. He says 
it’s quite a simple operation and often done, and 
may be quite successful, though, of course, they 
won’t guarantee anything, and they want to be 
paid first, which I don’t quite like. It rather looks 
as if . . . doesn’t It? But they find if the 
patient dies there’s sometimes a bother to get the 
money, as the relatives don’t always take their 
view, so I suppose It’s all right, and I arranged to 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


146 

go into the home he suggested, but I won’t give you 
the address because I know you’ll only write and 
try to persuade me not to have any operation, and 
Dr. Brown says it’s really necessary. I’m not tell- 
ing anyone my address, not even Mamma, for she 
is just as much against going into a home as you 
are; no one will know where I am, and all the 
doctors agree that that is much best, as then one 
is not disturbed by anyone. I will write to you 
as soon as I come out.” 

Dudley had laid this letter aside with a heavy 
sigh. “Poor girl, she’ll never come out!” And 
hard as he had felt it to be bound by this union, 
deeply as he loved Violet, and much as he had 
desired his freedom, still it only brought him dis- 
tress to think that his wife was going to be sacri- 
ficed in this horrible way. 

To his view, to the view of anyone who could 
read between the lines of her letter, she was going 
to a terrible and painful death, a poor, deluded 
victim to that fanatical worship of the medical 
profession, which is growing up in our midst. 

“Humanity has always been like that,” he re- 
flected. “When the priests of Moloch told the 
women it was necessary to throw their living 
babies into the flames, they did so, and now we 
have set up a new Moloch in our midst, and we 
call it Science, and the priesthood we call Doctors 
and Surgeons, and we are compelled to give our 
dogs and horses to their tortures, and it looks as 
if we should soon be compelled to give our men. 


ADVENTURE 


147 


women and children to their experimental knives.” 

He went back to the cavern that day extremely 
sad. He did not think of his approaching free- 
dom; he only saw a woman — young and beautiful 
— a woman who had been his wife, dying on the 
operating table. 

That had been some six weeks previously and 
no more letters had come from Bertha. 

This afternoon, as he lay there reading, sad 
thoughts were far away from him. The sun was 
warm on his neck, the water lapped musically be- 
neath him, the sky was blue and Violet near, and 
a mood of happy content enfolded him. He came 
to the end of his volume and closed it. Then he 
looked out and away over the laughing blue of the 
sea to the islands rising clear and dark against 
their vivid background of dancing light, and he 
thought he would like to go out and dine at the 
bungalow and be entirely surrounded by that 
element supposed to be so fickle and so unstable, 
but which is so faithfully true to those who have 
once, through patient love and devotion, conquered 
it and made it their own. 

He drew himself on his elbows, lizard-wise, to 
the edge of the rock, and looked over. There, 
below him, cradled softly in the clear green water, 
lay Violet, resting, almost sleeping, as a duck 
sleeps upon the water. By long practice and 
careful observation, she had acquired the art of 
real rest In the water. The Inflation of the chest 
and intense rigidity of the body, known to most 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


148 

of us as floating, is but a poor imitation of the 
methods and secrets which the Atlantic had taught 
her. By means of a perfect balance, similar to 
that which is necessary for bicycle riding, she could 
He in the water with her nose and mouth just above 
the surface and leave to the water Itself the task 
of supporting her outstretched limbs, which It 
fulfilled perfectly. 

He gazed down upon her, with Infinite depths 
of tender affection in his eyes. She had always 
been so dear to him: the dream, the vision beauti- 
ful of his whole life; and now, enshrouded as she 
was In grief, wrapped about in that hopeless 
desolation of heart and soul, she was dearer, more 
precious to him than she had been In the bright 
zenith of her happiness. It is no exaggeration to 
say that he would have given twenty years of his 
life to have had the power to console her. If he 
only possessed something that she needed or de- 
sired ! What supreme happiness to give it to her! 
But she wanted nothing. Indeed, she had every- 
thing. Fate had pressed all Its favours, all the 
gifts that others long for — youth, health, beauty, 
wealth, and the Infinite power of the able writer, 
all lay In that little hand, floating half curled up, 
like a closing lily, on the green surface below. He 
had nothing more to offer — life. Fate Itself, had 
nothing more, and yet he knew her heart, or 
rather the broken fragments of It, were gathered 
Into a shroud of grief, which could not be miti- 
gated. He sighed heavily. The one gift for her 


ADVENTURE 


149 


lay In the hands of Death. That might possibly 
re-unite her with the one she loved, or if the spirit 
world is only a dream without foundation, then 
It could bestow oblivion and peace. But he could 
give nothing — do nothing. If only she could have 
loved him! If only she could have been like 
other women and loved at all! He wondered if 
by any arts he could arouse her love. So far he 
had not dared to try, since the fact that he was 
married had precluded it. The intense, chivalrous 
devotion of a knight to his lady had been all he 
could show to her since he had been her guest in 
the cavern, but before — before her overwhelming 
grief, before the long war, before he had forged 
the fetters on himself, when they were both free 
and joyous as the wind that plays on a mountain 
top — then in that bright golden time he had done 
everything he could to win this lovely star from 
the heaven in which she seemed to dwell above 
him. He had pressed the Idea of love, of passion, 
of marriage upon her then, but she had always 
answered, “I am perfectly happy as I am. I 
don’t want to make any change. I could not be 
happier.” He had been always unable to pene- 
trate that armour of extreme content she had 
round her, but now — could he ever penetrate the 
armour of grief? Was not that still more im- 
possible? Of course, at present he was not free 
to try. He would have hated and despised him- 
self beyond endurance if he had attempted to 
rouse her love for him before he was free. If he 


150 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


had taken the slightest advantage of her hospital- 
ity and innocent trust in him. But he felt an abso- 
lute intuitive certainty that his liberty would be 
again his very soon now, and then was there any 
hope that he could awake even the tiniest respon- 
sive flame in her heart? He wondered. It was 
such a tender heart, she looked and seemed so 
intensely feminine, she wrote so beautifully of 
love, and yet — and yet no single pulse of it ever 
seemed to disturb the serenity of her soul. 

He continued gazing down upon her and won- 
dering at the skill she had acquired, the power over 
the great Atlantic, that made it her servant and 
friend. It was so calm and transparent just then, 
and the light had penetrated so far into its green 
depths that he could see straight down to where 
the seaweed waved on the shelving, rocky floor, 
and the slim, gleaming fish, passing, and re-passing 
on a level, below where the girl lay held in sus- 
pension, moving and swaying very slightly as the 
sea, looking more like the clearest jelly than wa- 
ter, heaved and swelled against the cliff face. 

After a little while she opened her eyes, and 
seeing him just above her, smiled at him, and with 
one of her soundless, smooth turns in the sea, put 
herself on her chest and with a single stroke 
pulled herself to the rock. 

“Shall we go out to the island and dine there 
and stay the night?” he asked. “It looks per- 
fectly lovely this afternoon.” 

She looked up to the sky and then across to the 


ADVENTURE 


151 

dark velvet blue of the Islands, rising from the 
dazzle and glitter of the sea. 

“If we go to dine, we must certainly sleep 
there,” she returned, laughing. 

“Why?” 

“We’re going to have a storm presently. Do 
you see those little woolly clouds coming up so 
white and pretty and full of light? They are Its 
forerunners. Its messengers; but It won’t be here 
for hours yet. We’ve plenty of time to reach the 
Islands and have a nice time first.” 

“All right. I’ll join you In two minutes.” And 
he retreated to his couch to find his swimming 
suit, while Violet just floated languidly, waiting 
for him. Nothing could be more exquisite than 
the appearance of the weather at the moment. 
The sky hung above, of the purest, most luminous 
blue, like a huge transparent bell. All along the 
horizon were the little tufty white clouds she had 
pointed out; but so far they only seemed In their 
brightness to Increase the glory of the sky. The 
sea was calm, so that a child’s paper boat would 
have floated on It unharmed, and glittered under 
the sun rays as If myriads of diamonds were 
sparkling on Its surface. Everything looked very 
near and yet very soft and rich In colouring. All 
down the coast the jagged cliffs took on a rounded 
velvety outline ; the Islands themselves looked near 
and entrancingly delicate In their form. Hardly 
a breath stirred, only a little zephyr from the 
south frolicked now and then amongst the dancing 


152 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


diamonds of light and stirred them into more 
blazing splendour. 

They swam slowly and easily, not hurrying to 
get to their destination, but rather lingering on 
every stroke to drink in. the glory and the beauty 
round them. When they reached the island it was 
nearing the sunset hour, and there was not hint yet 
of the coming storm. The air was still and golden, 
the sky warmly pink; only the little clouds on 
the horizon had increased in number and were now 
ranged close together in thick, woolly bunches. 

“I don’t believe in your storm,” said Dudley, 
teasingly. “Where is it?” 

“It will be here just when we are having din- 
ner,” the girl answered, calmly looking up to the 
serene and cloudless zenith, whose secrets she had 
learned so well. “You had better light your lamp 
and your fire. If you need them any time, you will 
now,” she added, smilingly, and sat down by one 
of the tiny bays that indented the rock-rimmed 
island. 

The perfection of light and colour was hers, as 
she sat on the rock in the evening glow, and Dud- 
ley went into the cave to attend to his lamps and 
fire. 

It took him quite an hour to get everything 
ready; the stove clean and burning, the lamp 
trimmed and alight, the canned meat open, and 
the wine cork drawn, and the rock table set ready. 
Then, as he looked up from his work, he saw the 


ADVENTURE 


153 

figure of the girl in the doorway. It was dark 
behind her and raindrops fell from her hair. 

‘‘You were quite right!” he exclaimed. “I 
couldn’t believe the storm would come up so 
quickly.” 

A great roar of wind passed In a blast over the 
island as he spoke, and the waters hissed In return. 

They sat well back in their rock room, and 
Dudley made a good dinner, while the girl ate her 
seaweed and mussels and then came and sat close 
beside him while he smoked. They sat and watched 
In silence the slanting rain sweep by the entrance 
and the intermittent starlight play on the glisten- 
ing rocks as the clouds raced across the sky in 
the first fury of the storm. 

It banged away over their heads for two solid 
hours. There was a madness of conflicting sound 
that seemed mere noise to the man, but the ears of 
the girl, so attuned now to the voices of Nature, 
could hear many harmonies in It, many subtle and 
beautiful tones. 

Then came a lull. It was like a pause in the 
speech of an impassioned orator. All the sounds 
seemed to cease at once. The girl looked up 
with a smile. 

“The worst Is over; let’s go out and see what 
it’s doing,” she said, and they turned the lamp 
down so that only a faint glow from it Illuminated 
the cave, and went down amongst the rock to the 
edge of the Island. All about them was a velvet 
blackness, but as the clouds scudded about In the 


154 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


troubled sky, they let the starlight through at 
frequent intervals, so that the eyes of these two 
dwellers in the open could see with ease. And 
there was much that was glorious in the night. 
The Atlantic apparently had business in shore, for 
the waves threw themselves along at a terrific rate, 
and they seemed to grow in size as the watchers 
stood there, till they became huge, black, smooth- 
shouldered mountains that rolled by, and the land 
on which they were, instead of rising above the 
ocean, seemed to be in a pit surrounded by rolling 
hills. They stood, backed up against a rock that 
protected them when the huge waves swept over 
the Island, and sometimes they were roofed by a 
clean-cut arch of falling water, which broke, hiss- 
ing and boiling, in surf at their feet, and drained 
away over the rocks back to the sea. After a long 
series of these enormous waves, there was a curi- 
ous, flat lull, and the surface of the ocean levelled 
Itself out again, and the island seemed normal 
land once more. 

Violet was standing gazing over the black, un- 
dulating plain when she suddenly grasped Dud- 
ley’s arm. 

“Look! Do you see that little light dancing up 
and down on the water? There must be a boat 
of some kind.” 

“I should think it’s doomed then, if there is,” 
he answered, looking over her shoulder. “Yes, I 
think I do see It — to the west.” 

The girl nodded. She w^as listening intently. 


ADVENTURE 


155 


and to her ears, so long accustomed to the sounds 
of the wild, came a far-off, faint human cry. It 
lived for a second in the lull of the waves, then 
died, then came, walling over the shimmering 
black surface that was beginning to pile itself Into 
mountains again. 

Then, before either could speak, one long, thin 
tongue of fire shot straight upwards Into the dark- 
ness of the night, quivered and vanished, perhaps 
veiled behind its own smoke. Then suddenly came 
a far brighter glare that lighted up sea and alr^ 
and this time they could see distinctly the outlines 
of a motor launch. The sullen sound of an ex- 
plosion travelled over to them, and other con- 
fused sounds of voices — crying, shouting, scream- 
ing. Then an olly-backed leviathan of a wave rose 
between them and what they saw and shut off their 
vision. When it passed the white glare had gone ; 
there seemed no more sound, only a steady red 
fire burned quietly In the distance to the water’s 
edge. 

‘‘Dudley, I must go and see what I can do. I 
may be able to pick up someone or take some- 
one off.” 

“My dear girl. It’s madness! It’s throwing 
away your life I” 

“No, I don’t think It’s very far off.” 

“I must come if you go.” 

“Well, come. Keep close to me In case you get 
exhausted. Swim as I’ve always told you — 
gently, all your body loose.” 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


156 

They waited to let a monstrous wave go by, 
then they dived in, heading, when they reached 
the surface, to the west. 

The waves were kind to them, as they always 
are to good swimmers far from the shore. There 
was no foam to choke or smother them, no sharp 
rocks to tear them, only those great tumbling bil- 
lows of water, that lifted them playfully high on 
their crests and then cradled them In deep, smooth 
valleys, and they swam on swiftly towards the 
little craft, where the fire burned steadily, redder 
and dimmer and lower down to the water. 

Ages of time seemed to go over their heads; 
Illimitable wastes of black oil-like sea seemed to 
stretch and stretch before them, but they did not 
tire, and at last the red gleam from the burning 
wreck made a direct pathway to their eyes, along 
the surface, down which they swam. A crying 
sound came from the boat, but It was curiously 
muffled and Indistinct. 

“Someone shut up somewhere, I think,” the 
girl called to Dudley. “I must get on board.” 

“Look out for another explosion. It’s quite 
possible,” he called back. 

By this tim'e they were close to the sinking ship, 
and the smoke and smother from it was coming 
out all over the water and enveloping them. 

The girl swam through it, keeping her head 
low, and In one of the periodical flats that took 
the place of rolling billows, she shot straight up 
to the hull where there was a black space between 


ADVENTURE 


157 

two lengths of burning bulwark, and scrambled 
aboard. 

“Don’t follow me,” she commanded Dudley. 
“Stay where you are and be ready to catch and 
support anything I throw.” 

The launch was sinking, but very slowly. It 
was quite low in the water, and the deck a regular 
death-trap — ^burning in patches, smouldering in 
others, and rotten all over. Even her light foot- 
falls broke through its charred surface. The hot 
wood burnt the soles of her feet, and twice she 
slipped through to her knee and drew her foot 
out bruised and bleeding. She paid no heed, but 
groped along as swiftly as all the burning lumber 
and debris allowed her. It was strangely quiet 
now on board, only the one continuous moaning, 
apparently from the end, told her of suffering life. 

Nearly choked by the smoke, and with her arms 
cut and burnt by the various objects that clawed 
at her as she passed, like human hands stretched 
out in the darkness, she reached the end of the 
boat at last, but there seemed no living thing 
there. She paused and listened. Her down and 
feather suit, all heavy with water, and her mass of 
wet hair on her shoulders, protected her from 
being actually burnt by the flames that licked her 
hungrily from minute to minute as the wind 
swayed them. There were many voices, other 
than the human one: whining steel and crying 
wood and hissing boards, as the water Invaded the 
sinking deck. It was horrible standing there In 


158 OVER LIFE’S EDGE 

the darkness and smoke, a darkness so pregnant 
with danger, and not knowing' whence the calling 
came. Then a board crashed in under her and 
she only just saved herself by springing to one 
side. A jet of fire spurted up from below and with 
it came the voice again. The voice of one im- 
prisoned there below amongst the flames! She 
realised now she should have gone below, and in- 
stantly moved back towards the companion way. 
She had passed It, she remembered, but It had been 
completely blocked up : things had fallen on It and 
lay there burning. It might be impossible to get 
down: equally impossible to do anything here at 
this end; the fire was darting out of the hole in 
the deck in quick eager tongues, which licked her 
shoulders and scorched her arms. She fought 
back through the smoke and fumes and reached 
what she imagined must be the top of the com- 
panion-way. A confused heap of wreckage, from 
which rose thick columns of smoke, lay over it. 
The pile was not burning, only smoldering now, 
for the crest of a wave had lapped over the deck 
and turned for the moment flames and fire into 
smoke. The crying sound came from beneath that 
pile. She dropped to her knees on the deck, and 
pushing out her hands and arms into the hot 
smoke, dragged aside the tarpaulin and splintered 
wood that helped to form the heap. As she did 
so the voice became clearer, and she wrenched 
with all her strength at wood. Iron, rope or tar- 
paulin, to force an opening through^the mound. 


ADVENTURE 


159 


Her nails were broken and her hands and arms 
terribly cut and bruised, and the water streamed 
from her eyes as the acrid smoke came out in savage 
puff^ into her face. She felt nothing, heeded 
nothing, only her great desire to help and save, 
and she worked desperately, in feverish haste, 
dreading each moment a great blast of flame 
would burst out as she disturbed the heap. But 
only smoke — thick, yellow, turgid smoke — ^kept 
bellowing out, and at last she felt she had made 
a complete, though narrow chimney down through 
the obstacles. The voice came clear now with 
nothing between. 

“Help! I can’t move!” 

She paused for a moment to get her breath : she 
was exhausted — gasping: sweat and tears from 
her scorched eyes pouring down her face. She 
twisted a strand of her wet hair round her mouth, 
then supporting herself on the hot timbers by her 
hands on each side, put her feet over the edge of 
the hole and lowered herself down Into the burn- 
ing chimney. 

For an instant she swung, as one does between 
parallel bars. Then her foot touched something 
scorching but solid. She guessed It was a stair. 

“Where are you?” she called, standing now 
and taking her hands from the edge above. It 
was pitch darkness; she could see nothing. 

“Here!” came a choked response, and she 
stretched out both hands towards the sound 
through the muffling smoke. She groped wildly: 


i6o OVER LIFE’S EDGE 

another second and she felt she must fall there 
suffocated. In the black darkness her hands 
touched something — a human face. She grasped 
at it, passing her hands round it till they clasped 
the head. She hazarded another step down: it 
bore her. In the black night of the hole, she 
stooped forward. 

“Bar across my knees,” came a thick mutter, and 
she ran her hands down the prostrate body till 
they struck a bar of wood, possibly the handrail of 
the stair — she could not tell — which nipped and 
held him. She tore at it : it gave way a very little. 

“While I lift, draw your legs away,” she called 
in a hoarse whisper, and bending over she pulled 
it upwards with all her force, while the man tore 
his legs from the trap and scrambled on to the 
stair beside her. Standing thus, pressed close to- 
gether, they yet could not see each other. 

The girl felt dizzy and a booming in her ears 
told her she was near the end of her endurance 
unless she could reach the air. But she meant to 
get her rescued one out first. An immense joy 
and pride surged through her and helped to keep 
weakness at bay. 

“Don’t follow the stairs; there’s no opening 
above. Put your hands up and pull yourself 
straight up.” 

The man did as she told him, and in a second 
she felt him pulling at the sides of the chimney 
she had made, and heard the scrambling rattle of 
the pile as he got up and clambered on to it. Fear 


ADVENTURE 


i6i 


that his weight would tumble some obstruction 
over the passage and block It again with her be- 
neath, dashed through her, and she sprang after 
him, swinging herself up the chimney, as she had 
for years swung herself up to the cavern. Side 
by side on the heap they struggled out of the dense 
volume of smoke that poured up from below and 
made towards the vessel’s side, where the wind 
came off the water. 

“Oh, thank God, thank God!’* the man ex- 
claimed, drawing In great breaths of it. “I 
thought I was done for then.” 

The girl did not speak. A great joy was filling 
her. She had saved a life! How glorious! She 
had rescued a fellow creature from that most 
awful death, burning alive, entrapped, unable to 
move. She had thought she could never feel joy 
again, but this was joy, keen, wonderful, pouring 
through all her veins. It revived her more than 
the salt kiss coming gently from the sea. She had 
saved a life! 

“Where’s your boat?” broke In upon her the 
man’s voice. She could distinguish him now by 
the intermittent light of the stars. He looked tall, 
strong, a splendid outline beside her. 

“I have no boat. I swam out from the Island, 
and we’ve got to swim back. Can you swim?” 

“Not a stroke ! It’s all over, then. The launch 
only had one boat and that’s smashed.” 

“It doesn’t matter. I can take you back.” 

With the wine of success and joy flowing hard 


i 62 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


all through her, she felt there was nothing she 
could not accomplish now. 

A dreary sort of laugh came hoarsely from her 
companion. 

“What island do you mean?” 

“The one nearest here of the five.” 

“That pile of rocks! That’s a long way off. 
You can’t swim that distance.” 

“How did I get here?” she asked quietly In 
return. 

There was silence a moment as they both stood 
gasping and pulling themselves together in the 
healing air. Then she heard him mutter : 

“Seems extraordinary ! I don’t see how you can 
save yourself and me.” 

“When you were down the companion with the 
pile on the top, you wouldn’t have thought I could 
save you, but I did. 

“Thank God, yes,” he returned. “Well, we’ve 
no choice, and we must get away from here. 
There’s more petrol and oil stored down below ; 
the fire may reach it any minute. What about a 
plank, or a box, or a tub? Would it help us?” 

“Only hamper and bother me in this sea. If 
you do what I say and don’t clutch at me I can 
save you.” 

The man did not in the least believe her, but 
there was no alternative. The whole night had 
been one of wonder and horror and deadliest 
terror, with a miracle in the middle. There might 
be another — ^who knew? 


ADVENTURE 


163 

“rm ready now. Follow me,” the girl said, 
and walked back towards the lowest part of the 
bulwark where the fire had eaten It away and the 
water was lapping over the smouldering edge. 
Her companion followed. A horror of death was 
upon him, so great that It froze him Into an out- 
ward composure. 

‘‘Now wait,” she said when they reached the 
edge, and before he could realize It, she had slid 
from him, from the deck and Into the sea. In the 
dim starlight he saw her disappear from him like 
a shadow and become one with the ocean. As a 
shade dissolving Into other shades she seemed to 
vanish. An Involuntary cry of dread burst from 
him. He crouched over the side, terrified to give 
himself to those black rolling masses of the un- 
known, terrified to stay with the fire beneath him 
creeping every Instant nearer the oil. He hung 
clinging to a twisted rail over the great void which 
had swallowed her up. Then from it came a soft 
voice, and he saw the white outline of her face 
shimmer up from the vague unformed darkness. 

“Now slip gently down to me,” she called. 
“Feet first. Slide down now there’s a lull.” 

But In a panic he clung there unable to move; 
his teeth chattering, his heart shaking and cold. 

“Give me your hand then. Come; you must 
before the waves return.” 

A white arm and hand rose up towards him. 
Unnerved, blind with terror, he grabbed at It and 
fell forward like a heavy sack into the sea; and 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


164 

then in that convulsive agony of one who fights 
with appalling, suffocating space, as It seems, he 
reached his arms out to the one solid thing near 
him and clutched the girl’s body in a strangling 
grip. And the ocean that supports so perfectly 
those who know how to treat it, angry at this 
struggling, grasping thing that violated Its com- 
posure, parted and divided on all sides of them 
and let them fall down and down as a stone in a 
well. The girl knew well enough to stop breath- 
ing, and this, from long practice, was no trouble 
to her. She closed her mouth and drew her 
nostrils in tight the last second before the surface 
closed over them. 

Dudley had been waiting as she told him, as 
near to the launch as possible, hearing something 
of all that went on on board and guessing the 
rest. A great, smooth billow had borne him a 
little distance from the wreck just at the moment 
when her arm went up, and he divined what had 
occurred when the splash of the man’s dead 
weight came to his ears. Desperately afraid for 
the girl, he swam to the place where they had dis- 
appeared, and almost as he arrived, he saw her 
dear little sleek head, round and smooth as a 
seal’s, come gently up just in front of him. She 
turned over, backing her shoulders against the 
billows, and he saw she had both hands elapsed 
round the face, under the chin, of the unconscious 
man she had rescued. She was using only her 


ADVENTURE 165 

feet to swim with; the man’s body trailed along 
at her side. 

“Away!” she called to Dudley. Let’s get 
away from the wreck. I dread the suck under if 
it sinks.” 

A few strokes brought him close beside her. 

“I was afraid he would clutch you.” 

“He did. I had to strike him on the throat, or 
we would both have been killed. It’s all right 
now.” 

Her tone was light and cheerful as if she were 
sitting at home talking to him from an armchair, 
instead of just having escaped from one savage 
element and now being supported on the troubled, 
uncertain breast of another. 

He marvelled at her courage and coolness. 
Lions and lionesses, he thought, must have been 
the stock from which the electricity was taken that 
formed the current of her life. 

The sky had cleared wonderfully: there was 
bright starlight now, and he could see the wounds 
and cuts shewing black on her white shoulders and 
the elation on her face as she pushed rapidly 
through the calming water with her burden. 

“Ah I” She gave a deep exclamation, and turn- 
ing instantly, Dudley saw one white sheet of light 
wrap the launch behind them from end to end. 
A crash and a splitting, tearing, sound came next, 
as the little craft broke in the centre. They saw 
the ends lift up, black in the white glare, then fall, 
and a great column of blood-red flame towered 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


i66 

straight into the darkness a moment only, then 
with a hissing rush, the waters took their prey. 
Smoke, white light, and red flame vanished, and 
only the boiling turmoil and the valley of the 
whirlpool shewed where the boat had been. 

“Just away in time,” she called, in her laugh- 
ing voice, and Dudley shuddered inwardly. What 
would he have felt if she had been drawn under 
and was now in that terrible valley behind them! 
How very dear she was — the sun of his whole life, 
as she had always been. She did not speak again, 
and they both swam on in silence, giving them- 
selves up wholly to the task of getting back to the 
island. The wine of success in their veins kept 
them warm and poured energy along their limbs. 
To fail now, after so much joy-crowned effort, 
was impossible, unimaginable, and they silently, 
intensely, concentrated themselves on the re- 
remainder of the task. 

At last, over one long, rolling ridge of billows, 
they saw the island black before them, etched on 
the lesser blackness of the night: gaunt and grim, 
bare jagged rocks, yet to them home, as much as 
the sweetest flower-crowned land. A wide, wide 
flat to be crossed, and then beyond, the rim of 
gleaming surf which marked their goal. 

Tired, longing for rest, stinging with painful 
wounds all over her, the girl made her final effort 
in the struggle through the foam and surge round 
the island, and at last drew herself and her charge 
up the steep, inhospitable shore between the two 


ADVENTURE 


167 

big rocks that formed a sort of rough rudiment of 
a harbour. Up, up, with Dudley’s arm beneath 
her shoulders, she crawled, and then sank, thank- 
ful, relieved, happy, at the entrance to their cave. 

Gently they drew their burden within, and the 
girl on her knees beside him, hung over him, full 
of interested pride. He was a man in the very 
prime of life, with a fine, well-knit figure, and the 
pale face on which the lamplight fell showed regu- 
lar and clear-cut features. 

“He Is handsome, isn’t he?” she exclaimed, 
panting joyfully after all her exertions. She was 
gleefully proud of her accomplished success, and 
the pain of her scorched arms hardly penetrated 
to her consciousness through the excited delight 
in her triumph. 

She bent over him and put her arm under his 
head. At first she surveyed the finely-modelled 
face with proud satisfaction: then slowly her look 
changed. 

“Dudley!” she exclaimed sharply, “look 
here I” 

He came and bent over her. “What Is It?” 

“Look at his face! It Is handsome, but look 
at the mouth, look at the expression ! What do 
you think of them?” 

“I think you’d better give the poor devil some 
brandy instead of studying his features !” an- 
swered Dudley drily. A thrill of jealousy passed 
through him as he saw her trembling, excited, 
eager form, a little panting still, and beautiful 


i68 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


beyond words in her attitude of gentle solicitude, 
bending over the heaven-sent guest. The curve 
of her bare white arms and shoulders, splashed 
here and there with the scarlet of superficial cuts 
and scratches, the grace of the falling twist of 
her hair, which in her kneeling pose nearly 
touched the ground, made a picture that 
burned into his eyes. She lifted her glowing 
face to him, happy except for a little cloud of 
anxiety that had gathered there. 

“Of course! Give me the flask. How much 
shall I give him?” 

“Take care ! Don’t choke him. Let me . . .” 

Dudley too'k her place, raised the man’s head, 
and put the flask cautiously to the closed lips. In 
a moment the man opened two large grey eyes 
and smiled up at him. 

“Thanks ! I am all right now,” he said, raising 
himself into a sitting position and looking round 
him. 

“Why, what a house you’ve got here. Where’s 
it all come from? Is it magic?” 

He took up the glass by his side and drained it. 
It was a stiff drink and the fire ran through all his 
chilled frame and set his brain working. He 
looked from one to the other enquiringly. Who 
were these extraordinary people, he wondered. 
Fishers, or smugglers, or wreckers, or what? He 
had heard there were queer people to be found on 
the Cornish coast, but these . . .? 

“No, I think we’re quite real,” Dudley answered. 


ADVENTURE 


169 

‘‘I expect we’d better get all your wet clothes off 
and dry them at the stove. I can rig you up in 
some things I’ve got here.” 

Violet turned away and walked to the mouth 
of the cave and stood looking Into the blackness. 
She felt overjoyed at her success. She had done 
what hardly any other woman could and very few 
men. She crossed both wounded arms over each 
other and literally hugged herself with delight. 

After she had allowed time enough to elapse, 
she turned and walked back to the stove. The 
stranger was lying comfortably in its warm glow, 
dressed in some old bits of clothing that Dudley 
had given him. But even in that queer rig-out, 
his good looks asserted themselves, and she had 
a strange feeling of pride. 

“Let me make him some Bovril,” she said 
eagerly to Dudley, who was spreading out the 
man’s suit near the stove to dry. “It must be 
better than all that whiskey.” And Dudley felt 
a little pang of regret as he unpacked the bottle 
from his stores and gave it to her. Not once 
since their reunion had he seen her so interested 
and pleased. 

She made the beef-tea with care, and then car- 
ried it to the man and dropped on her knees be- 
side him. 

“What is your name?” she said, as she bent 
over him. 

Dudley watched her with delight, and yet just 
a little tinge of jealously coloured it. She was 
evidently so overjoyed; her eyes were bright, her 


170 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


cheeks were glowing. He knew that her heart 
was dancing. Her scratched and torn limbs, her 
cuts, bruises and burns were nothing. She was 
brimming with the delight that all successful 
great achievements give. Alas ! He had no share 
in it. He had not given nor caused her pleasure. 
This stranger had brought it to her. 

The man looked up admiringly at the lovely, 
glowing face bending over him. 

“Smith,” he answered, and added: “Not a 
very interesting or romantic name, but it sounds 
a good deal better with ‘Professor’ put before it, 
and a good many letters of the alphabet after it.” 

The girl drew herself up suddenly, her face 
paled. 

“Are you Professor Smith who wrote ‘Nerve 
Dissections’ ?” 

“So you have read my book?” he exclaimed 
delightedly. “I feel very flattered. Such books 
do not generally find many readers outside science 
circles.” 

“Yes, I read it,” the girl answered dully. “And 
you are that Professor Smith,” she added slowly. 
“You wrote also ‘Shock and Pain,’ and ‘The 
Value of Experiment.’ ” 

The man nodded complacently. 

“I did. You have the satisfaction of knowing 
it’s not just an obscure Mr. Smith you took the 
trouble to rescue.” 

He was excited and pleased; the warmth of the 
fire on all his chilled frame and the warmth of 


ADVENTURE 


171 

the good whiskey within It, was reviving him, 
but her words had been more powerful than even 
whiskey or warmth. Her sudden change of man- 
ner, her wondering, disconcerted accents, he took 
to be the expression of respect and awe at dis- 
covering what a well-known person he was, and to 
be rescued from a burning wreck by an altogether 
charming young person, who has not only saved 
your life, but has read your books and seems to 
be deeply impressed by your fame, has a stimu- 
lating effect even on a cold-blooded, cold-hearted, 
scientific professor. 

Violet set the cup of Bovril she had been stir- 
ring beside him. “I will come back In a minute,” 
she said, and turned away. 

Dudley had heard the conversation between 
them, and he guessed what she was feeling as she 
changed colour and drew back from the man she 
had been so eagerly tending. 

He sprang up and followed her out of the cave. 
The wind was blowing cold outside, and rain 
splashed on the rocks about them and drove into 
their faces. She paid no heed, only pushed her 
arm through his and took the little worn trail 
down to the sea edge. Arrived there, she flung 
herself down in a passion of tears and sobs. 

“Oh, Dudley, what have I done?” she ex- 
claimed, stretching out her hands to him. “I was 
so happy; I thought I had done such a fine thing. 
And now — you heard what he said? Out of all 
the men In the world that I might have saved and 


172 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


rejoiced over, that it should be a monster like 
that. It’s too awful to think of. Oh, why am I 
so unlucky?” 

Dudley took her ice-cold little hands and 
pressed them against his breast. For the moment 
he did not know what to say to comfort her. 

“Have you read his book, by any chance — 
the big one?” 

“No, I have not. I know his name, though, 
of course.” 

“His book is utterly horrible. You feel as you 
read it that no sane, normal person could have 
written it. Only a diseased brain could have 
devised the fiendish experiments on dogs that he 
describes. And I have saved this fiend. I have 
brought him back to go on with his awful work.” 

“You couldn’t help it. You did what you 
thought was right at the moment. One can’t do 
any more than that,” Dudley answered. “The 
least little thing that we do may have the most 
far-reaching consequences; we can’t be responsi- 
ble for them.” 

“No, but what shall I do now?” she replied 
in a low tone, creeping up close to him. “What 
is right, now that I do know ?” 

Dudley started. For the moment he had not 
thought of any new issue springing out of the 
man’s words. To his more easy-going male mind 
the matter seemed settled. She had saved the 
man’s life and it was unfortunate that it turned 
out to be such an unworthy one, but there it was 


ADVENTURE 


173 

— the thing was done, and as he said, the girl 
was not responsible. 

This was not how it appeared to Violet, and 
her tone conveyed to him something of her 
thoughts. 

“You can’t undo your act,” he said suddenly, 
trying to see her face in the thick, rain-filled 
darkness. 

“Dudley, I must. The man is not fit to live. 
He is a man in the grip of an appalling vice — 
perhaps he cannot help it, but such men are a 
curse to humanity; they set an example, they 
preach doctrines that others follow. I cannot 
turn him loose on the world again.” 

“What vice do you mean?” 

“The love of inflicting torture. His brain is 
turned with it; he wallows in it. You can see it 
in his book.” 

Professor Smith, left to himself in the cave, 
stretched himself before the fire, poured out more 
whiskey and drank it, and began to feel very 
comfortable. He knew he was taking more than 
was quite wise of the fiery drink, but he was 
accustomed to key himself up with spirits before 
going to perform an operation, or to his labora- 
tory for a night’s work, and he gloried in that 
sensation of supreme excitement which precedes 
actual Intoxication. 

After the terror and horror of the earlier 
evening, a tremendous reaction had taken place. 
He was overjoyed at his life being given back to 


174 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


him after that hour on the launch when death 
had seemed so certain and so close; overjoyed at 
being without serious injury, and very much 
amused and intrigued by the way the rescue had 
been made and the queer and novel circumstances 
in which he found himself. The girl was so nice- 
looking, and he had evidently made a conquest. 
His brain grew more alight and glowing every 
moment, and the tin cup of whiskey went fre- 
quently to his lips. 

When his hosts re-entered the cave, his face 
was full of colour, and he felt in a jocular and 
merry mood. 

“Just fancy you having read my books,” he 
said, looking up at the girl as she approached 
the stove. “I am particularly glad you’ve read 
‘The Value of Experiment.’ I think that’s my 
best.” 

“What animals do you use for your experi- 
ments?” asked Dudley sombrely. 

“Dogs! There’s nothing like dogs — friend of 
man, you know. He, he!” the man laughed, 
stretching out his thin, sinewy hands to the stove 
and then smoothing them one over the other as 
if washing them in the red light. “And so they 
are — nice gentle, trusting creatures, never turn on 
you no matter what you do. I ripped open a 
dog’s stomach the other day, stuffed in some 
powdered glass, sewed him up and there he lay 
swelling on the table and howling like mad. Kept 
him like that five days, then — would you believe 


ADVENTURE 


175 


it? — when I went to unstitch him and have a look 
at his Inside to see what was going on, he licked 
my hand just as he rolled over and died. Nice 
creatures. I love ’em!” 

“And what was the good of that experiment?” 
asked Dudley again, while the girl sat quite white 
and silent opposite him. All that the man said 
was nothing new to her. The same things, and 
thousands more horrible, are written and printed 
in books that can be bought In any bookshop, 
and she had read many such books. 

“Oh, no good at all, but Interesting, you know, 
very interesting. Come to that, none of these 
experiments are any good — only we have to keep 
on telling the public that to keep it quiet.” 

There was a pause. Nobody spoke, only the 
wind moaned and whined round the cave. Could 
the wretched man have heard In that wind a warn- 
ing of the fate hanging over him. It might have 
staid his reckless tongue; but he did not hear nor 
heed. Some curious madness of self-revelation 
seemed to possess him, and he continued to babble 
on. 

“Nice case I had lately. A woman came to me 
with a pain in her stomach. Put her on the table, 
of course under the X-ray. Kept her a bit too 
long I suppose, and the pain got to be agony. 
Then I found I’d burnt her stomach clean out. 
It was just gone. I thought I’d make some stock 
out of this, so I opened her up, cut away a few 
rags which remained, and sewed up the oesophagus 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


176 

— that’s the upper stomach, you know — on to the 
bowel. Operation perfectly successful. Then I 
got hold of the papers and this was heralded all 
over the place. Marvellous cure! Wonderful 
triumph of surgery! etc., etc. Oh, to read those 
reports you’d think to part with your stomach 
was the best bit of luck that could happen to you. 
The creature, of course, was in torment all the 
time. The X-ray burn goes on and on, and she’d 
had her dose. However, I kept her on show a 
bit and persuaded her she’d had a wonderful cure, 
and stuffed her full of all sorts of vitalizers to 
keep her going a bit, and people came and saw 
her and said: ‘How grand!’ and what wonders 
medical science could achieve. All very nice for 
me, of course, and big fees. Then when I saw 
the crash was near and she must go pop soon, 
I sent her away into the country to ‘complete 
the cure’ — a good long way into the country, too. 
Well, we kept bulletins going for a little while, 
then let the thing drop, and the public was never 
told, of course, that she died just a week after she 
left. It was a joke on them.” 

‘‘Now, Professor Smith, I would like to ask 
you a few questions,” Dudley said quietly. “We 
have heard how you burnt a woman’s stomach 
out with X-rays, and how much she benefited by 
your wonderful after-treatment. Will you tell us 
now if you, or any members of the medical pro- 
fession, with all your marvellous knowledge and 
your vaunted powers, can cure a common cold or 


ADVENTURE 


177 


restore one single white hair to its former colour? 
If you could do this there would be a real benefit 
to humanity, but you can’t. After all the centuries 
of enquiry, after all the millions of animals sacri- 
ficed, here we are still suffering from colds, just 
as we always did. What are your researches 
worth if you cannot cure the simple, common ail- 
ment that all humanity wants cured? Now, an- 
other thing. If you and your class are so valuable 
to the world, as you are always making out, can 
you show that humanity is longer lived now and 
more free from disease than formerly, when 
doctors were few and scientific research unknown? 
You know that the contrary is the case. There 
are more, many more diseases now. You, by your 
methods, are creating new ones all the time. Since 
the serum treatment craze came in alone we have 
new diseases that were never heard of before. Your 
culture of disease germs, your inoculations, your 
X-ray treatments are manufacturing disease, not 
helping to combat It. I defy you to show one 
instance where medical scientific research has 
really helped humanity; where a triumph over 
disease has been secured by man It has been 
through his commonsense. You say that small- 
pox has been largely conquered by vaccination. 
There never was a greater fallacy. Smallpox 
has been stamped out — as to Its epidemic form 
— ‘by isolation. Commonsense again! Formerly 
it was the fashion to let the smallpox patients 
sleep with the healthy. Of course, smallpox 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


178 

spread. Now we isolate the patients and natu- 
rally the disease does not spread. Where you 
can get true statistics, which is rare, you find 
always that the vaccinated die of smallpox in 
equal numbers with the unvaccinated.” 

Dudley stopped to get more cigarettes out of 
the box, and the doctor stared at him in a dis- 
concerted sort of way. 

“It’s all very fine,” he muttered, “but you 
can’t get along without doctors.” 

Dudley laughed. “Do you know I’ve lived in 
places where there were none, yet the people 
were healthy, busy, prosperous and happy. Their 
graveyard showed deaths at ninety and over, 
rarely under. How do you account for that?” 

“Don’t believe you,” returned the other 
shortly. 

“An easy way to argue,” replied Dudley 
serenely. “Yet the places are there, all over the 
world, and you will not melt away because you 
do not believe in them. Commonsense is those 
people’s safeguard; it beats what you call science 
every time. Science is a destroying force in these 
days. Look at antiseptic surgery. You thought 
that so fine you deify the man who introduced 
it — and look at Its results. You sprayed open 
wounds with carbolic acid. You gave your un- 
lucky patients kidney disease by so doing, and 
killed them by thousands. The kidneys were 
shrivelled up, burnt out. You fell back at last on 
antiseptic treatment, which means simply keeping 


ADVENTURE 


179 


a wound clean. Commonsense again ! The most 
ignorant person knows a cut or wound must be 
kept clean. Yet you, with your science, have to 
murder countless poor wretches before you get 
round to that simple fact. I tell you. Professor, 
when I hear you scientists prating of what you 
have done for mankind, I feel inclined to tot up 
all the thousands and thousands you’ve slaugh- 
tered. I believe if a true and just account were 
brought into the light, and everything you may 
have done for us put fairly down on one side, 
and on the other, all the untold numbers you 
have killed — formerly by your blood-letting and 
your antiseptics, and in the present day by your 
X-rays and your serums, there would be found an 
appalling deficit of human life, and your science 
would be shown to be one of the greatest curses 
humanity has had to bear.” 

The doctor blinked his reddening eyes as he 
stared at Dudley in silence. He was trying to 
think out in his brain, confused now by his liberal 
drinks, whether these hosts of his were friends 
or enemies. Then he laughed confidently. 

“My friend, it’s no use your talking! Good or 
bad, the public loves us and will have us. We’ve 
trained it very carefully, and whenever it gets a 
bit restive, why, we treat it as we do our patients 
and give it — dope! We have doped the public 
pretty well, I must say, with one lie and another,” 
he went on, after a minute. “Lord, how it does 
make me laugh when a poor wretch of a carter is 


i8o OVER LIFE’S EDGE 

hauled up for cruelty to his horse ! They should 
just see those horses we have in hand — for serum 
treatment and diphtheria — those moaning beasts 
would make the old judges wink. But It’s science 
with us — he, he ! — so it’s all right. We get titles, 
and the carter goes to gaol. Then there’s a society 
for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and the 
same old ladies who subscribe to that may often 
subscribe to us, too — to our hospitals and our 
scientific research. Oh, Lord! the whole thing 
is a joke! We have millions given to us to carve 
up animals alive, and how we make ’em suffer — 
atrociously — yes, atrociously!” He washed his 
hands again in the light and licked his lips as he 
repeated the word and lingered over it lovingly. 

“Then, if these experiments are not any use, 
you do them because you like them?” Dudley 
remarked. 

“Like them!” the man exclaimed, suddenly 
sitting upright. “They are my life!’* His eyes 
burned. He lowered his voice suddenly. “It’s 
like drink — once it gets you, the love of the knife, 
you can’t get away from it. We’re all a little mad, 
we surgeons, but it’s a glorious madness. Put a 
knife into a surgeon’s hand and give him some- 
thing to cut — something alive — that writhes and 
screams, man, woman, child or animal — and he’s 
happy.” He was sitting erect now, his eyes blaz- 
ing, a feverish spot of colour burning in either 
cheek. He glanced round, and seeing the elapsed 
knife Dudley had used lying open by the store 


ADVENTURE 


i8i 


boxes, he stretched out his hand and took it up, 
fixing a shifty, fiery gaze upon his entertainers. 

“Lay down that knife,” said Dudley sternly. 
“You are not in your laboratory here.” 

“No, I wish I were,” the man answered lightly, 
throwing the knife from him and with an instant 
return to a normal manner. “But I’ll be back 
there soon, please God, and thanks to that young 
lady there.” He smiled genially. “I only hope 
I won’t find my attendant has messed anything up. 
What do you think the idiot did one time when I 
left him in charge? Killed, deliberately killed 
one of my dogs that I had had under experiment 
two years, and which was giving me most interest- 
ing work. Said it seemed in such agony it wasn’t 
right to torture it any longer. Sentimental ass!” 

There was silence round the little stove. By its 
light cast on her face, Dudley saw what the girl 
was going through. She was stone-white, her 
lips set as one in great pain, her eyes black with 
suffering. He expected her to speak, but she said 
nothing, and after a minute the man remarked: 

“I loathe sickly sentiment, don’t you?” 

Then she answered, and her voice was quite 
calm and steady. “I don’t know what we should 
do without it. Sentiment is the greatest force in 
the world. Sentiment, English sentiment, won 
the war for us against all the power and science 
and preparedness of the Germans. I think what 
we call sentiment is a manifestation of divine 
power through us, and that’s why it’s stronger 


i 82 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


than anything human, that is why it conquers 
everything, as we see it doing every day.” 

“Good gracious!” returned the scientist, cud- 
dling his knees, and went on in the indulgent tone 
of one talking to a child and leading it on to ex- 
press its views. “And so you think sentiment 
won the war? I always thought the guns and 
men did that,” with a facetious chuckle. 

“It was sentiment that gave us those men in 
their thousands, willing to die for their country. 
It was sentiment that made all the nobles give 
up all they had and rush to the colours. It was 
sentiment that made all the wealthy pour out their 
wealth for the country, and it was sentiment that 
made me rescue you, at the risk of my own life, 
from that burning ship ” 

“Oh, yes, I — of course, did not mean that . . 
the doctor tried to break in. 

But Violet went on as if she had not heard him. 
“And it is sentiment now that will force me to 
undo what I have done and leave you here — to 
die!” 

She sprang to her feet as she spoke, and looked 
down upon him as he sat huddled on the rock in 
the circle of the lamplight. Her hands were 
clenched at her sides, her arms hung straight 
down, her face was deathly pale. Only Dudley, 
looking at her, could form any idea of the terrible 
suffering it cost her to come to such a decision. 

The man stared at her, not comprehending. It 
was like some grim joke, but an awful feeling of 


ADVENTURE 


183 

terror came near to him. It seemed as If fear 
personified, though he hardly grasped as yet of 
what, had tapped him on the shoulder. 

“What — what? I don’t understand! What 
do you mean?” he stammered, and instinctively 
he glanced round at the bare, black, desolat-e 
rocks, and thought of the dark roaring waters 
encircling them and their edges of furious surf, 
a band of seething white, like grinning teeth 
bared to devour him. Above, the Inky, raging 
sky, all round, the trackless ocean — no hope or 
help anywhere except just within this narrow circle 
of light, and In this slender form facing him. 
In her centred every hope of life, every chance of 
escape and existence, and now, somehow, she 
seemed turned against him. What had hap- 
pened? A moment ago he had felt so secure, so 
confident. Now he was vaguely, horribly afraid. 

“I realize what I have done In saving you,” she 
said, “and I feel It’s my duty to undo the crime 
I have committed. You are one of those men 
whom fate, for some inscrutable reason, lets loose 
upon the world, perhaps as a scourge for the evil 
It does. But fate ordained now, apparently, that 
you should be roasted to death on that boat. I 
interfered — I saved you, not knowing what you 
were. Now that I do know, it’s Impossible for 
me to let you go back to curse humanity with your 
presence.” 

Into the man’s memory, as he listened, fell like 
a flash, a scene of long ago, when as a young man. 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


184 

having just received his full certificate to conduct 
experiments on living animals, he had, behind the 
locked doors of his laboratory, for his father’s 
edification, himself an ardent medical research 
worker, gouged out the eyes of a cat, and as 
they had both watched the agonies of the sightless 
animal on the operating table, his father had 
patted him on the back and said: “You’ll go far, 
my boy, and become a great scientist; but mind 
my advice — never talk of what you do if you 
don’t know your company, unless you are obliged, 
and If you are obliged — lie.” 

How well he remembered that — the scene — ^his 
father’s voice — the good advice given — that had 
he only remembered it now would have saved 
him. Lie, He, lie — yes, that was what he had 
always done — lied to the public, to his patients, 
to even his nearest friends, to everyone, except 
when he was sure he was in the company of scien- 
tific men like himself. And now — what could 
have induced him to abandon that splendid prin- 
ciple? Why here, in this helpless situation of all 
others, and to an idiotic girl, should he have given 
himself away? The excitement, the fatigue, the 
whiskey, he supposed, must have affected him, and 
then now, lately, people had been growing so 
much more In sympathy with all experiments and 
inoculations and so forth. They were giving up 
all that sentimental rot about protecting animals. 
But still, he ought to have been more cautious. 
His frankness had got him into a tight place now. 


ADVENTURE 


i8s 

What could he say to pacify this fool? He’d have 
wrung her neck without the slightest qualm of 
conscience if it had been a question of her standing 
between him and safety, but unfortunately it was 
the other way about it. She was the bridge to 
life. 

These thoughts shot through his brain like 
bullets, burning and tearing as they went. “Look 
here,” he stammered uncertainly, “these things 
are not fit to joke about. You’re not going back 
on your promise to take me to land, are you? I 
assure you I’ll make it worth your while. I’m 
rich myself, and I’ve no doubt my hospital 
would ” 

Dudley Intervened. “It’s no use talking like 
that,” he said. “The lady you are addressing has 
far more than she needs already.” 

So she was rich, this wretched girl — ^that made 
things still more difficult, thought the doctor, and 
if she were rich, what on earth was she doing 
here, with this man, wandering about half-naked 
on the rocks? It was all a mystery; he couldn’t 
make it out, but things looked pretty green for 
him, he thought. “No more ‘ops. in private’ for 
you, old boy, I’m afraid.” His mind was fast 
becoming a mass of disordered fear. He could 
not collect his thoughts or command his speech. 
With an effort he wrenched himself together. 

“Look here, what have I done? What’s turned 
you against me? You saved me, as you say, at 
the risk of your life just now. Well, what’s 


i86 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


changed you? Is it what IVe said about my 
work? Perhaps Pve been boasting a bit too 
much. What’s offended you? I can’t make out.” 

“Offended me!” repeated the girl with white 
lips. “There’s no question of personal feeling. 
It does not matter to me what you say. It’s my 
responsibility for your life that I am concerned 
with. Don’t you see how you appear to me — 
to all normal people — whatever your scientific 
friends and companions may think of you? To 
me you seem a fiend, an abnormal being alto- 
gether, a dangerous monomaniac, a man obsessed 
with the love of torture — the worst of all the 
vices. How can I take the responsibility of rescu- 
ing you — giving you back the opportunity of con- 
tinuing your horrible practices?” 

The awful fear was growing In the doctor, its 
strangling grip was on his throat. She meant It, 
she meant it! This dreadful girl, with her set 
lips and stern eyes. She meant to leave him here 
to die, to leave him here alone in the midst of this 
raging blackness — now — here — In the middle of 
his great career, within sight of new honours — 
when the public were waiting to acclaim him and 
shower new marks of favour on him, when all his 
life shone bright and prosperous before him, he 
was to die! He saw his luxurious house In town, 
filled with rare and beautiful objects from all over 
the world; he saw his large, well-warmed labora- 
tory, equipped with every instrument known to 
science for every kind of excruciating torture — 


ADVENTURE 


187 

his dear laboratory, where he had spent so many 
happy hours. He saw his consulting room, filled 
with his smiling, confiding patients, deliciously 
docile, stupid and blind, believing in every fairy 
story he told them, fondly imagining he cared for 
their benefit, never dreaming they were simply 
material for experiments when experiments on ani- 
mals began to pall. Yes, he had loved his life— 
his brilliant, successful, affluent life, and he had 
flung it away now, It seemed, by his foolish talk. 
What could he say or do now to set things right — 
to save himself? Oh, the fool he had been to 
speak frankly, to let the truth out! Why had he 
not spouted the usual bunkum about working for 
the benefit of humanity? Could he work that 
dodge now, he wondered? But then, this girl 
knew — she knew too much — she had read his 
book. He had given facts away In that, he re- 
membered; written freely, because, as a rule, only 
scientists read these books. Oh, heavens! What 
could he do to save himself? 

“Horrible practices!” he muttered after a 
second. “Do you mean the experiments I told 
you I’d made on a few rotten animals?” 

“No, I am not thinking of anything you have 
said In particular, but your whole conversation; 
all you have said to us here has revealed you quite 
clearly as a man in the grip of an awful vice, and 
one who in pursuit of that vice will do incalcul- 
able injury to all the poor, silly, trusting people 
who come to you for help and advice. TTiey do 


i88 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


not understand — they do not know what you 
really are. We can leave the animals entirely out 
of the question. If I put you back in the world, 
what will you do to your fellow human beings? 
To gratify your curiosity you will poison their 
blood with your inoculations, about the effect of 
which you know absolutely nothing, and the deadly 
results of which will go on for generations. Why 
should countless generations of innocent beings be 
burdened with agonies of unknown and horrible 
diseases to gratify the caprice of one man? You 
have no sense of pity, of sympathy. What is 
there to restrain you? You are not a normal 
man; you are just a senseless force of evil, and is 
it my duty to put you back in life where you can 
do so much harm? I don’t think it is.” 

She was sitting down now, facing both the men, 
the wind roaring round their little shelter and the 
hiss of the boiling surf amongst the rocks, failed 
to drown her clear, even tones. They fell like 
ice on the crouching figure by the stove. The 
light from it showed his face, thin and pinched 
with fear. 

“But what’s the use of venting your spite on 
me — just one — when there are thousands of men 
who think just as I do and do the same things?” 
he muttered between his chattering teeth. 

“I am not responsible for those men and their 
actions. I should be for you and yours if I gave 
you back to life,” she replied simply, and the cold- 
ness and the calmness of her speech and tones, the 


ADVENTURE 


189 

restraint and control of her manner, the absence 
of any excitement, or as he would say, hysteria, 
the quietude of her demeanor, froze his blood. 
He felt resolve behind it. She seemed something 
implacable, immovable, like Fate itself, something 
impersonal which he could not grapple with — 
inexorable, deadly. 

He kept his eyes fixed on her, fascinated. Each 
instant he feared to see her rise and leave the 
camp and plunge — fearless devil as she was — Into 
that raging sea, and her companion would follow, 
doubtless, and he would be left — left there alone. 
He almost screamed with terror as he faced the 
thought. But they should not escape. If he was 
to die they should die with him. He could find 
some means to kill. His eyes instinctively glanced 
round upon all the pointed and jagged rocks lying 
almost at his hand. But not yet, he must try to 
beg his own life from her. Surely something 
could reach her, soften her. He glanced at Dud- 
ley seated beside him. Was there any chance 
there? But the soldier’s grave, clear-cut profile, 
showing against the rock in the yellow light, gave 
him little encouragement. 

“What do you think, sir? Do you agree with 
the lady?” 

“Pretty much, I think,” answered Dudley 
briefly. “All you scientific men — medical science, 
of course. I’m speaking of — seem to me a danger- 
ous unscrupulous lot. You neither know nor care 
how your doings affect others, and all your talk 


190 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


about benefitting humanity is just to humbug the 
public, and make a cloak for your own craze for 
inflicting pain. You know very well experiments 
on living animals would never be allowed if the 
real truth about them and what they lead to were 
understood.” 

“But — ^but — ^haven’t you ever been helped or 
benefited by our science or cured by a doctor?” 

“No, I have not. I have been nearly bundled 
out of existence by their infernal methods once 
or twice — that’s all I know about them, but if I 
had it wouldn’t affect the great issue. Of course, 
you may benefit some, but, as I say, the balance is 
against you In the whole account. The evil you 
do is infinitely greater than the good.” 

“And In the Army? Didn’t we do good there 
in the war? It’s usually admitted the innoucla- 
tions did prevent typhoid.” 

Every hope was failing him, but he still strug- 
gled on. So long as they talked there was a 
chance. Something might occur to him that might 
move these wretched, stony-hearted creatures to 
' pity. 

“Typhoid was prevented by our serum treat- 
ment, surely,” he repeated. 

“Fiddlesticks! Typhoid in the Army was 
lessened by the men being obliged to boil the 
water they drank. You see, I was there in the 
war the whole four and a half years, and I know 
something about it.” 

The doctor looked up eagerly. “Well, in all 


ADVENTURE 


191 

that time didn’t you ever get wounded and have 
to thank a surgeon for something?” 

‘‘Thank God, I never fell into their clutches!” 
returned Dudley fervently. “And sooner than do 
so I would have finished myself with my revolver. 
They got hold of one of my friends, and would 
have taken his leg off when there wasn’t the least 
necessity, and the arm of another, and left those 
two fellows mutilated for life, If I hadn’t inter- 
fered. That’s one experience I had of them.” 

“Good God! What extraordinary prejudice!” 
exclaimed the doctor. 

“Well, there Is a prejudice, I admit, against 
losing one’s limbs,” returned Dudley grimly. 

“But how do you know the amputations were 
not necessary?” 

“Because both of those men have their leg and 
their arm respectively to-day. Pretty good proof. 
Isn’t It?” 

All this time the girl had sat silent, not looking 
at the men while they talked, shading her eyes 
with her hand. 

The horror of the thing that lay before her 
weighted her down, paralysed her. To leave a 
fellow human being alone to die, to starve, when 
she had it In her power to save. It seemed to her 
horrible; It oppressed her, sickened her. She was 
cold mentally and physically, down to the soles 
of her feet resting on the rock. Yet nothing else 
seemed possible. To bring back this man after 


192 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


hearing what she had heard, and knowing the true 
significance of his life and work in all its horror 
and loathsomeness — this would be Incalculably 
worse. Could she ever close her eyes in sleep 
knowing that he, by her Instrumentality, was work- 
ing in his laboratory, preparing from the agony of 
dying animals his serums, that would later transfer 
their agonies, or other deeper ones, to the human 
race? 

Could she ever rest in the day, knowing that 
he was walking, permitted by her weakness, his 
hospital wards, practising his awful principles 
there amongst the Ignorant and the helpless? 

No, better this horrible duty of extinguishing 
one life than partnership in the martyrisation of 
thousands. 

Why had this test come to her? she wondered. 
She had tried so hard to escape from life and its 
various torments and trials. And like a blood- 
hound, life had run after her and caught her again 
in its fangs, even here, over the edge of the world. 
She had been cowardly, perhaps, in trying to 
escape. Each one has his alloted place in the 
world — ^work to do, trials to undergo, tasks to 
perform. None must leave their posts till death 
calls them away. She had been cowardly perhaps, 
and this was her punishment. Well, she would 
not fail now. She would not shrink. Suddenly 
the thought of Jael came to her — the Biblical story 
read long ago. Had she suffered like this when 
the fate of Israel was given Into her hand? Per- 


ADVENTURE 


193 


haps not. Elation, triumph was the keynote of 
the story, but the English girl felt none of these. 
There was not even the sense of acting as an 
avenger to excite and warm her heart: no fervours 
of righteous vengeance to sustain her. She was 
not of that nature that delights In vengeance or 
likes to judge and punish. Had she rescued an 
ordinary murderer, or anyone who had grievously 
injured her In the past, she would have readily 
forgiven, and as readily saved him. To the past 
belonged all past wrongs, and to her view, judg- 
ment, punishment and vengeance were in the hands 
of God alone. It was only plain, cold, stark duty 
that called her now; and it was not punishment 
for past, but prevention of future wrongs that she 
had to deal with. 

She rose and crossed the circle of light. The 
doctor was talking eagerly to Dudley, but for 
some time she had not heard what they were say- 
ing, Immersed in her own bitter thoughts. 

“I think we had better leave you now,” she 
said as he turned anxiously towards her. “You 
must see I can’t do otherwise. There Is the lamp 
and food on the Island, and covering. Perhaps 
you will be sighted from the shore, or fate will 
intervene again In some way to save you. With 
that I have nothing to do. I must do my duty 
as I understand it.” 

The peaked face of her listener grew sharper 
and paler still as he heard. He sprang up as she 


194 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


finished and seized her hand, dropping on his 
knees before her. 

“Wait, wait!” he said wildly. “Listen! I’ve 
been saying I will give up my profession, give up 
everything, if you spare my life. I will promise 
you, swear to you I will never touch a knife or a 
scalpel again — I’ll swear it!” His voice died 
away in his throat, choked by terror. 

she looked down upon him ; a melancholy smile 
flickered for a moment on her face. “What have 
you to swear by?” she asked him. “What do you 
believe in?” 

He hesitated, disconcerted, remembering his 
denial of the spirit, the soul, God — that stood 
written in his books, books which she had read. 
“If I promise — promise — if I ” 

The wind moaned and howled about the cave, 
even the steady little flare of the covered-in stove 
wavered and shook. The man clung desperately 
to her hand as if already drowning. He glanced 
round him wildly; speech forsook his shaking jaw 
and chattering teeth. 

“I would accept your promise if you were any 
other man than what you are,” she replied. “But 
you are without the pale of ordinary mankind. 
I know you would not keep that promise. I 
know you are lying to me now. Your whole life 
is a lie and you laugh at the people who believe 
in you. No man who is dead to all pity and all 
natural feelings as you are, can be alive to truth, 
or feel bound by his word.” 


ADVENTURE 


195 


“Don’t leave me ! Don’t leave me I” he 
mumbled wildly, beside himself with terror, no 
longer able to appreciate the meaning of words. 

Dudley rose and came between them. “Leave 
go,” he said sternly, releasing the girl’s hand from 
the clinging fingers. He saw how the strain was 
telling on her. He saw and felt every throb of 
her anguish. Better the black storm and the piti- 
less sea with all Its dangers for her In her ex- 
hausted condition, than the prolongation of this 
nervous struggle. “Bear up — accept your fate like 
a man. We’ve all got to die sometime. Come, 
Violet.” 

The man fell back, an Indescribably evil look 
gathering on his. face. They turned to go, and 
he watched them for a second, huddled In a 
crouching, muttering heap. 

“Die !” he repeated to himself. “Yes, we have 
all got to die.” He let them turn the corner of 
projecting rock and go out into the wind-swept 
darkness and turn down towards the shore. Then 
he crept after them. Murder ! Murder, yes — but 
how? A rock hurled by his shaking hand might 
not reach Its mark, and the man was far too strong 
and large to attack successfully, but the sea should 
aid him. 

Down, down towards the edge they went In the 
dark, keeping close together, the wind buffeting 
them and the rain slashing upon them sideways; 
and the stealthy form behind them crept on after 
them In their steps. 


196 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


“The man is following us — ^be on your guard!” 
she said to Dudley, though she had not turned 
her head. 

There was a place in the lee of the Island where 
the water was sheltered, deep and comparatively 
smooth. For this they made ; the starlight gleamed 
out fitfully now and then amongst the scurrying 
clouds. Just as a little light was mirrored In the 
bay they entered the water. As they did so the 
creeping form stood up. With a yell of fury, in- 
coherent like that of a beast of prey, the man flung 
himself into the sea, and locked his arms round 
the girl’s waist before she could shoot clear of the 
s’hore. Struggling, gasping, choking, with mouth 
open and lungs rapidly filling with water, he yet 
kept his vice-lIke grip on her and dragged her 
beneath the surface. Dudley saw her w^hlte hands 
glimmer before him as she sank. His plunge for- 
ward brought him over them both, and his hands 
like steel went down on the man’s head, and then 
pressed round his throat and held it In a squeezing 
grip. For an eternity, as It seemed to him, he 
held It so, below the water, then he saw the out- 
line of the girl’s head rise beside him In the faint 
light, and knew the man’s arms had relaxed their 
hold. He took his hands from the neck, and the 
body sank from him like a stone. 

“Darling, are you hurt?” 

“No, oh no,” she answered. “You saved me. 
But for you he must have killed me. Let us swim 
straight to the cavern. I want to get home.” 


ADVENTURE 


197 


Out on the star-lit water, turbulent and troubled, 
rain^beaten as it was, she yet felt better. After 
all, this sea that had cradled her so long had 
become her friend and support. Her fatigue left 
her, fell from her. She struck out by his side with 
sure straight strokes for home. 

Dudley swam strongly and evenly beside her. 
He was in good condition and felt little fatigue. 
The experience an the island had not been harrow- 
ing to him as It had been to her. For four years 
and a half he had been mainly employed In ter- 
minating existences, and the existences of com- 
paratively good men — men who were doing their 
duty and facing death bravely, and the awe that 
for most people surrounds the taking of human 
life had been for him greatly diminished. To- leave 
the wretched creature on the island after his con- 
fession would only have taken him a few moments 
to decide, and though the girl’s struggle to see her 
duty clearly had vibrated through him. It had not 
affected him, except through sympathy with her. 
As the heave of the water carried him along, he 
felt soothed and refreshed by It, and the motion of 
swimming was hardly any effort to him. Wind 
and tide favoured them; the sea was flowing In 
towards Newquay, and the water, though it rose 
and swelled In great mountainous billows, pre- 
served an unbroken surface. The clouds were 
lifting and the starlight gleamed down more and 
more frequently on them, showing them their 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


198 

course. Far away on the Eastern horizon quiv- 
ered the first shafts of light of the dawn. 

Dudley swam close to her side and put his arm 
over her shoulders. How smooth and warm they 
felt to his touch! She also raised the arm nearest 
him and passed It over his waist. Thus they swam 
like one person, using their left arms only and 
their fine foot stroke, strong from long practice, 
to send them swiftly and smoothly flying over the 
vast black plain. 

‘‘Oh, Dudley,” she said, after a long, silent 
Interval, “the horror of life! How it oppresses 
me ! To think that our cities are full of such men I 
To think that their horrible laboratories, centres 
for spreading disease, are everywhere scattered 
throughout the country. To think that these men 
are honoured and feted by the foolish public who 
are blind to the mischief and the danger of it all, 
who cannot see the tyranny they are setting up 
over themselves. How frightful it all seems. To 
think that England, which should be In the fore- 
most rank of kindness and humanity, should be 
duped into protecting, upholding, patronising the 
most awful vice that exists — love of torture for 
torture’s sake, just because it calls Itself science 
and holds its revels and Its orgies in places it 
calls laboratories. Will England ever wake up to 
see what she is dong?” 

They were swimming slowly over the gradually 
calming water. It was only a little fretful now. 
The clouds were drawing away like silken curtains 


ADVENTURE 


199 

upheld by the hand of God. Starlight was on the 
sea. In it her white face turned up to his. 

“Yes,” he answered, “England will awake, 
the whole world will awake to see these things In 
time. But it may take a long time. It won’t be 
probably until the human race is all poisoned and 
crippled by the serum treatments of to-day. But 
what can one do? Each age seems bound to 
have its horrors, its cruelty-mongers, its devils, its 
devotees of the lust for giving pain, and each age 
patronises them under a different name. In the 
time of the Inquisition they were called Ministers 
of Religion, and supposed to be acting for the 
benefit of the soul; now they are called scientific 
men and supposed to be acting for the benefit of 
the body. We look back with horror on the In- 
quisition; we never see that the same crimes are 
going on now under the name of science. But 
another age, a future age, will look back upon the 
serum treatments, the vaccination, the Inoculation, 
the unnecessary operations of to-day, with all the 
amazement and condemnation we express now for 
past religious tyrannies. I should not be surprised 
if the medical profession itself decides to abandon 
all Its mire of experiments and to stand free of It.” 

“At present it Is all so horrible. Oh, Dudley, 
I feel so wretched. Shall I cease to swim?” She 
ceased as she spoke, but before the impetus of 
the stroke failed, or her body lost its balance on 
the surface, his arm passed under her chest sup- 
porting her. 


200 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


“No, no; let us get home to the cavern. We 
must forget this night. Why should you worry 
about the world and its doings? If it likes to pet 
up a loathsome vice and a monomania under the 
name of science, if people like to be chopped up 
by surgeons and poisoned with inoculations, let 
them. Don’t bother about it ; it’s nothing to you.’’ 

“One cannot escape from life,” she sighed as 
she spoke, and took up her stroke again languidly 
and slowly. 

“Your cavern is a long way from the world.” 

“Yes, but evil penetrates to the farthest corners 
of the earth. It is just like a weed. You drop one 
tiny seed of it, even on the most unfavourable soil, 
it takes root and spreads all over the country; 
and good is like a delicate flower — you plant it 
and guard it with the utmost care, and it won’t 
spread, it won’t even grow; it fails and dies out.” 

They swam on in silence for a few minutes on 
the calming water under the paling sky. The 
wind had sunk. Out here, far from the break of 
waves on the shore, there was a vast, soft stillness. 

“It does seem like that,” Dudley answered after 
a pause. “But yet reforms are carried through 
in the end. We’ve got rid of the horrors of the 
Inquisition; we have got rid of torture in our 
prisons; we have got rid of the extreme cruelty 
in the Navy, and we shall get rid of these horrible 
practises by surgeons and doctors eventually.” 

Warm pink light began to grow in the East, and 
spears of it went up to the zenith. The grey of 


ADVENTURE 


201 


the tremulous water turned tO' an opaline tint. 
Cheered with the sense of the coming light and 
warmth of the sun, they quickened their strokes 
and swam on swiftly towards the dawn. 

When they reached their home reef at last, all 
was glowing ruby bright about them, and the tide 
at Its height w^as sending In long tranquil rollers 
to break In surf upon the lonely beach. On the 
top of a great flooding swell they were carried to 
the lip of the cavern, and sank down thankfully 
to rest on Its sandy floor. 

Dudley Immediately began lighting the stove at 
the far end, boiling water and doing all the fussy 
little duties of a civilized home-coming. More 
than all, he wanted to treat and care for the burns 
and scratches the girl had received, which now, 
after long Immersion In the cold salt water, flared 
out In dusky red patches and lines on her white 
skin. 

But she would not have any of his ministrations. 
“Sleep Is all I want,” she said. “To sleep and 
forget!” 

She refused the hot drinks, the food and the 
ointment for her wounds alike, and went up the 
rock stairs to her upper ledge. There she changed 
her wet garment for a soft, dry cloak, and flung 
herself down In the feathers, aching from head to 
foot, her limbs burning In the scorched patches, 
her heart and soul sick beyond description. Sleep 
only came to her fitfully. In snatches. 

Dudley, sitting alone In the cheerful light of his 


^02 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


little stove, with a cup of good stiff whiskey and 
water beside him, warm, in a dry suit, smoked 
thoughtfully, gazing with sombre eyes out to the 
birth of the new day. At intervals he heard her 
sobbing above him, and every fibre in him seemed 
straining to go to her side, take her in his arms 
and comfort her. But he kept an iron hold on 
himself. He knew he was not free; he had no 
right, and he did not dare. 


CHAPTER VI 


STARLIGHT ON THE SEA 

It was night: between midnight and dawn, and 
Newquay slept on, its cliffs, blind and deaf, 
wrapped In a heavy sleep that In the morning 
would give way to the endless round of trivial, 
common things that make up human life. It was 
night, yet there was neither blackness nor silence. 
All down the coast the caverns were singing joy- 
ously and a golden glory of starlight fell all over 
the sea. 

The air was so clear that all sense of a dark sky 
was lost; it was just one dome of light, flashing, 
restless, pulsating, quivering light, that hung over 
the plain of the sea, spangling it all with gold. 

Stars above, myriads of stars from zenith to 
horizon, stars reflected in the water, so that each 
ripple gleamed with light. Stars everywhere, 
stars of great magnitude, stars like crosses, stars 
like Irregular blocks of light, huge planets of green 
and silver just looking over the horizon, fierce red 
fiery stars high in the zenith, small stars like dia- 
monds, and all standing out from a background, 
not of velvety blue as we see It in mistier climates, 
203 


204 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


but from a background of yet other stars like 
scintillating diamond dust; and all in dancing 
movement so that the whole sky seemed in bril- 
liant whirling motion in keeping with the joyful 
floods of melody pealing out from the caverns. 

And Newquay slept on its cliffs ignoring all, as 
humanity passes through the whole of its life, 
ignoring the best in the world. But there were 
two, floating far out on the golden, sparkling plain, 
who were drinking in the glory and the wonder 
of it all. 

Side by side, reposing easily on the warm, soft 
buoyant water, they lay looking up into the 
diamond-encrusted dome above them — the dome 
of fiery whirling light. 

“Did you ever realize that the sky was white 
before — ^white with stars that ordinarily one does 
not see ?” Violet queried as they gazed upward. 
“I never did. The Atlantic has taught me so 
many things.” 

“No, I’ve never realized what starlight can be 
before to-night,” Dudley answered. “Not even 
in the tropics. I used to think the Pacific the 
most wonderful sea in the world, but I have 
changed. It has not the songs and the stars of the 
Atlantic.” 

“I am glad,” the girl answered softly, and they 
lay rocking there in silence, listening to the waves 
of melody floating out to them from the shore. 
Every cavern seemed to have its thousand mer- 
maids in it, singing gloriously, and the sound of 


STARLIGHT ON THE SEA 205 

the great bell was chiming all down the coast, 
that long, loud, haunting call that once heard can 
never be forgotten. It seemed to spread all over 
the great plain round them so that the whole air 
was trembling with melody, and rise upward 
through the millions of miles of space towards the 
white dome of leaping fire above. The sense of 
immensity, of freedom, was superb. It seemed to 
the two human beings as they gazed and listened, 
that their spirits were caught up on those floods 
of melody and were being borne higher and higher 
towards the crystal light above. 

“How beautiful life is, like this — without 
walls!” she said after a minute. “Think, If we 
were in the world, we should be perhaps dancing 
now, in a room, a few feet square, walls on every 
side of us, and the cruel, blinding, electric light 
over us; and It would all be hot and glaring and 
tiring, and there would be people radiating malice 
and envy and hatred all round us. We would have 
had to be there at a certain time, we would have to 
go at a certain time. There would be walls all 
round us, mentally as well as physically. Walls, 
walls everywhere. Here, there are none. Space 
and time Is our own — Is it not much better?” 

“Yes, in a way It Is, for a person like you; but 
most people like their own kind and all their petty 
little squabbling ways. Bring ordinary people out 
here and they’d be wretched. With no ear for 
music they couldn’t hear these wonderful melodies ; 
accustomed to spectacles perhaps, or pinc-nez, they 


206 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


couldn’t see the stars. Human beings always re- 
mind me of blackbeetles in a dirty underground 
cellar. Bring a blackbeetle into a lovely rose 
garden full of hot sunshine and fragrance and it 
is miserable. It only wants to creep back to the 
darkness and filth of its cellar again, and to its own 
kind.” 

The girl sighed, gazing up to where the stars 
whirled in their white glory and listening to the 
siren songs wafted over to them on the flower- 
scented breezes from the land. 

“Still, they do go to the Opera, and they take 
yachting cruises to beautiful places, and some of 
their houses are lovely,” she said after a minute. 

“A few, a very few. The great masses of peo- 
ple you will find extraordinarily blackbeetlish in 
their love for covered-in, dark dwellings, for dirt, 
for mental and physical squalor, and for mingling 
with great herds of their own kind.” 

The girl shivered and turned over on her breast 
in the cradling water. 

“I suppose so. Don’t let’s think of them. They 
spoil all this. Let’s imagine we are alone In the 
world at the dawn of creation, before Nature 
made her colossal mistake and gave life to man.” 

Dudley laughed; “I want no one else,” he said 
softly, and slid his arm caressingly over her gleam- 
ing shoulders. 

They swam parallel with the shore, taking the 
direction towards Bedruthan Steps as the surging 
chorus of sweet voices seemed to call them there. 


STARLIGHT ON THE SEA 207 

Wildly, exquisitely sweet, full of passionate in- 
vitation, the perfect songs rose in the starlit, 
scented air; walling over the water with a tone 
of maddening melancholy, they seemed to twine 
Invisible arms round the listeners, drawing them, 
seducing them to the rocky shore. Yet on that 
shore there is nothing but the jagged rocks, the 
massive cliffs, reared up against the sky, and the 
huge caverns with the waves of the wondrous 
Atlantic sweeping In. 

“No wonder there are wrecks here, Dudley,” 
she said as they approached nearer. “Curiosity 
alone would bring the sailors here when they heard 
such singing. Can it really only be the mechanical 
action of water rushing through caves, or are there 
such things as sirens or spirits? Is It possible?” 

Her voice was overawed. The spell of this 
magic coast was on them both. 

“Everything Is possible,” he answered. 

“Let us close In and explore,” she whispered 
back. “Let us see If we can find the sirens.” 

By the brilliant starlight they swam into the 
broad and noble bay. The level of the surface 
was lowering, the tide was beginning to recede, and 
sharp points of rock and flat shelving ledges be- 
gan to show, while facing them in the lofty tower- 
ing cliffs were the huge portals of the many 
caverns. The two human beings, looking like two 
tiny fish in the immensity of this stupendous frame, 
drew themselves up on a rock island and sat there 
listening. They were now In the centre of that 


208 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


wondrous flood of harmony. It poured out from 
the caverns, it seemed to rise from every rock, to 
float on the water, to fall gently from the tower- 
ing cliff face ; a chorus of voices male and female, 
wonderfully clear and wild and sweet — as if from 
an enchanted choir. Yet they saw nothing. The 
starlight fell clear and white on rock face, and 
gently heaving surface of the bay. No form or 
shadow was there, not even a moving mist wraith 
to cheat the eye. After a time they slid from their 
rock and swam to the nearest cavern. It was full 
of the sweetest music. They swam in and round 
the rock walls, and the melody seemed above them 
as if a choir were seated high up in the roof of 
the cavern. Y et when they looked up and listened, 
the singing seemed to recede and be outside the 
entrance, rising from the starlit water, and when 
they swam out it passed over their heads and filled 
the cavern they had left. It was a Will-o’-the- 
Wisp, but to the ear, not to the eye — a maddening 
mystery of sound. They swam about silently, 
crossing and re-crossing the great bay from rock 
to rock and from cavern to cavern, and the music 
rose gloriously all round them and over them as 
if the air were full of thousands of harps and lutes, 
played by invisible fingers — the accompaniment of 
voices rising from invisible throats. It was every- 
where, yet they could not locate it. It was as if 
the air itself had become music. Wherever the 
air was, there was music; that was all one could 
say. As the tide continued to flow out of the bay 


STARLIGHT ON THE SEA 209 

the sound, with all its heavenly sweetness, became 
fainter. Less and less in volume grew the melody. 
It was as if the choir were rising, departing, and at 
last the two listeners found themselves left on the 
wet and shining sands at the foot of a mammoth 
rock where there had been innumerable wrecks; 
in silence, with the pink dawn breaking in the sky. 
The white starlight had gone; the voices were 
gone. There was an unutterable quiet round them; 
they gazed at each other. 

“We failed to see the sirens,” she said sadly. 

“That does not prove they were not there,” he 
answered, and they sat resting and thoughtful as 
the pink light from the east fell all about them 
and down the now silent coast. 


CHAPTER VII 


REJOICING 

It was June and the cavern was at its loveliest. 
The sea pink had thrown its rosy mantle over 
every promontory and cliff head. A beautiful 
hanging cornice of its glowing blossoms was 
looped along the edge of the land all down the 
Cornish coast. From the azure of the sky fell the 
lark’s song in a flood of melody, swallows skimmed 
gaily over sea and land, the white gulls in their 
infinite multitudes starred the cliffs resting on the 
ledges. Over the cavern, the turf was thick and 
soft, studded with cus;hIons of the sea pink that 
threw its sweet perfume on the summer air. Here 
stretched out full length, his elbows supporting 
his chin, lay Dudley, reading a letter he had 
brought out with him from the Newquay post 
office. He studied the even typescript with frown- 
ing brows. 

“Dear Sir, 

“We regret to inform you your wife passed 
away this morning. Her mother was not pres- 
ent but had spent the previous afternoon with 
210 


REJOICING 21 1 

her, when she appeared to be doing well. 

“Your wife underwent an operation last week 
which was perfectly successful, and her sudden 
collapse this morning was most unexpected. We 
are communicating with the lady’s mother ” 

and so on, and so on — all the mass of verbiage 
that usually surrounds the bald fact that a foul 
murder has been committed. 

He looked at the page heading: “Dr. Smith’s 
Nursing Home.” The Initials and the address 
were the same as those given by the man Violet 
had saved from the wreck. Dudley crushed the 
letter together In his hand and looked over the 
dancing amethystine sea to where the Islands rose 
dark and jagged against the laughing blue of the 
sky. So he was free ! And the man who had given 
him back his freedom was the man whom he had 
killed on the Island. Well, the unutterable brute 
lived no more. It was something to rejoice over, 
but that death had been far too light a punishment 
for him. Had he been killed by torture every day 
for years, it would only have been the fate that all 
his miserable life he had been meting out to 
others. He glanced again at the letter, without 
reading It his eyes caught in amongst the crumples 
of Its surface his angry clutch had made, the words 
“all that science could do,” and a little lower, “the 
greatest scientist of the times.” With an oath he 
tore the letter to pieces and threw them amongst 
the gulls flying close above him. “God In 


212 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


Heaven!” he muttered, “how long will this ghoul- 
ish mania for tearing living bodies to pieces, pose 
and be accepted as science?” 

The gulls laughed quietly, their own inimitable, 
cynical little laughs, skimming over his head. 
Dudley sat with his hand covering his eyes. He 
had wished for his freedom, yet somehow, no 
feeling of joy mixed now with his gloom. He was 
anguished, distressed, grieved. The thought of 
that young and lovely life mercilessly destroyed 
had in itself so much suffering, it blotted out for 
the time the personal point of view from which he 
might have looked at the matter. 

After a time, as he sat there, the sound of sing- 
ing came to him and he knew Violet must be near. 
He got up and walked to the edge of the promon- 
tory, and there straight before him in the blue, 
jelly-like water, he saw her, floating, her limbs 
shell pink, and her bright eyes like fallen bits of 
the sky. 

At the sight of her joyousness came back to him. 
After all, he was blameless in the matter. He had 
always tried from the first to shield his wife from 
the men who were exploiting her, and it was her 
own fault she had perished in this wretched way. 
He who lives by the sword dies by the sword, and 
equally truly, he who lives by drugs and the sur- 
geon’s knife, dies by them. 

In that moment of gazing at the sunlit picture 
before him, he realised he was free now to speak 
to Violet as he had never spoken yet; free to go 


REJOICING 213 

forward and fight to make her his own. He re- 
solved he would tell her everything; start with a 
clear field behind him and a free field in front. 

“What are you doing all by yourself up there?” 
she called in her clear young voice. “Come down 
and swim, the water’s lovely.” 

“No, you come up here and sit by me in the 
sun,” he called back. “I have been reading my 
letters and I have something to tell you.” 

“Very good,” she answered, and in two long 
strokes had reached the rock, and with quick, agile 
movements, equal in beauty to a cat’s, in barely a 
minute had climbed to his side. 

“Here I am,” she said smiling and sitting down 
on the turf, spreading out her hair to the sun in 
long separate strands that it might more quickly 
dry. 

“Now your news !” she said lightly, as he took 
his place close to her. But Dudley seemed to find 
It hard to begin. He gazed and gazed at the 
marble-like shining shoulders, at the round throat 
and pink cheeks, at the pink-tinged knees and the 
rosy-soled feet, and these failing to make words 
any easier, he at last looked away to the far 
horizon, frowning and silent. 

At last he said abruptly: 

“All this time I’ve been here with you I was 
married.” 

“Yes, Dudley, I knew that,” Violet returned 
simply, letting her fingers play Idly over a great 
cushion of sea pink just beside her. 


214 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


Dudley started: 

“You knew it? How could you?” 

“Why in the same way a woman knows every- 
thing she wants to know. You men always make 
that mistake ; you think a woman needs to be told 
things. She doesn’t. She has an extra sense that 
men have not, just as she has an extra organ in 
her body. I have known, of course, all this time 
that you had a wife and I know now you are going 
to tell me you have lost her.” 

Dudley sat staring at her In amazement. 

“But how?” he gasped at last. “I don’t see 
how.” 

“Well, In the first place, men deny that women 
possess any logic. The fact is that women are 
intensely logical. Two and two with them always 
make four and not five or any other number that 
man is trying to force down their throat. I knew 
that loving me as you evidently do, nothing but 
another woman would induce you to leave me 
occasionally as you did. Therefore, you went to 
a woman. The fact that you never seemed the 
least pleased or elated when going, told me It was 
a matter of necessity not of pleasure. Therefore, 
you were going to a woman you had to go to. If 
this woman had been a mistress, or in any kind 
of position except a wife’s, under all the existing 
circumstances, you would have got rid of her, but 
she was someone you could not get rid of. There- 
fore, she was your wife. Therefore, you were 
married. It’s perfectly simple. The only remark- 


REJOICING 215 

able thing would have been If, while living wltk 
you like this, I had not known.” 

Dudley sat silent, pondering all this for a long: 
time. Then he said : 

“Well, If you know it all, there’s not much to< 
tell you. Are you glad that I am now free?” 

“No, not at all,” she answered promptly, “be- 
cause now you will be worrying me to marry you.” 

Dudley hunched his shoulders and looked away 
to the sea. 

“Do you know how she died?” 

“I should imagine from the way you have al- 
ways talked she died in the hands of the doctors.” 

“She did,” assented Dudley grimly. “Do you 
know which ones?” 

Violet looked at him closely. 

“No,” she answered simply. “I don’t know any 
doctors.” 

“You had rather a remarkable experience with 
one anyway.” 

“Oh I . . .” her face blanched as it always 
did at any reference to the island incident. 

“Smith?” 

Dudley nodded. 

“How very strange,” she murmured, and they 
both sat silent side by side, looking out to sea. 

“She died In the nursing home of the eminent 
scientist, after a perfectly successful operation,” 
said Dudley bitterly, imitating the medical jargon 
of the day. 

Then all of a sudden a desperate revolt against 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


ai6 

all the sadness and horror of life, largely man’s 
own manufacture, filled him. He rolled these 
thoughts out of his mind. 

He turned to the beautiful living thing by his 
side and flung his arms round her before she could 
move or resist. 

“It was her fault. I did all I could to stop her 
folly. She made me suffer frightfully in the past; 
she shall not take all my future. I love you. 
You know I do. Marry me, and let us live and 
love and enjoy every moment that is left to us. 
Let us have children that are free and joyous and 
strong, let them play with the sun and the storms 
as the sea gulls do. Oh, we could be so happy, 
darling, darling.” 

Violet had ceased to struggle In his arms. She 
could not get out of them. She waited until her 
passivity and dead silence had its inevitable effect 
on him, and he loosened his hold of his own ac- 
cord. Then she freed herself, and drew away 
from him, seating herself on a little tussock, 
whence she surveyed him with curious eyes. 

“ Y ou want us to go back and live in the world ?” 
she asked. 

“I should perfer it, yes. You must admit this 
cavern existence has its limitations, but I will live 
here if you like. Say you will marry me first, 
then we can settle everything else afterwards.” 

She smiled and looked away. How like a man, 
she thought; that was always their way: do what 
I want, let me see that I get all I wish. Your 


REJOICING 217 

views, your plans can be discussed any time or no 
time. That was what their propositions always 
amounted to, however worded. How very un- 
fortunate his wife had died. She foresaw there 
would be no peace now. She must make up her 
mind either to dismiss Dudley finally — perhaps 
swim away from him in the night and lose herself 
in one of the thousand caverns far down the coast 
— or marry him and return with him to life in the 
world. She did not believe for one moment he 
would live on indefinitely in the cavern, once mar- 
ried to her. And to return to the world, to work, 
to worry, to achievement that achieves nothing 
since in the end the grave of Time swallows all 
that we do, could she face It? Instead of that 
glittering sea before her eyes and the sand, sunny 
and hot under the sole of her foot, there would be 
the narrow and dreary streets of London, filled 
with the cruel, callous crowd of human beings and 
lined with hideous buildings on either side ; 
churches, where never a true lesson of kindness or 
mercy was preached; hospitals and laboratories, 
where, In darkened cells, hundreds of animals were 
lying in agony, gasping out their lives; law courts, 
seething with loathsome prisoners; Houses of 
Parliament, where inhuman laws were made by 
careless and Ignorant politicians. Instead of white 
gulls for companions, crowds of jabbering apes, 
for man is nothing but an intensified ape, prating 
of their discoveries and their progress. Progress 
to what? Life is a circle. There can be no pro- 


2i8 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


gress anywhere. We simply go round and round 
on that circle to which our feet are tied. Before 
the girl’s eyes came the vision of Memphis, one of 
the great cities of the Egyptians. There is no 
doubt they knew everything we know to-day. 
They used electric light, for otherwise the interior 
of their windowless tombs unstained by lamp or 
gas smoke, could not have been painted as they are. 
Telegraphy and telephony was known to them, 
and much that we do not know of Arts and chem- 
istry and building, was known to them. They 
touched the top-most pinnacle of civilization. 
They recognised what we are only just now per- 
ceiving, that Woman is the highest development 
of the ape-tribe. They gave her government and 
power. They no doubt talked of their progress 
and advance as we European apes talk to-day. 
Yet Memphis now! Go and see Memphis — a 
plain of burning, barren soil with little heaps of 
earth, little mounds all over it, from which the 
wind blows the dust in its levelling process every 
day. That is Memphis. That is what it has ad- 
vanced to — Dust. A few waves of time passing 
over us, and London will be as Memphis is, and 
the horde of trampling apes that now fills its 
streets will be — Dust — and all they have discov- 
ered and invented and prated of and prided them- 
selves on, will be forgotten as the glories of Mem- 
phis. 

All this passed through the girl’s brain as she 


REJOICING 219 

gazed steadfastly out to sea, and she hated the 
thought of returning. 

Dudley watched her and racked his brains as 
to what would help him most. 

“Dancing — you used to love it so and dance so 
well,” he hazarded softly. 

She said nothing — only shook her head. 

“Do you remember that night we heard 
‘Tristan,’ and the gold brocade you wore? At 
the supper you looked so lovely.” 

This time she smiled, but still shook her head. 
Her smile was at his thinking the memory of a 
gold brocade and the triumph at a supper-party 
could move her now. How far, how immensely 
far she had slipped from all these things ! 

“Well, come and conquer a new element with 
me, then. If you will marry me I will take up 
flying very seriously. I’ll geit perfect in it, and 
we’ll have the most up-to-date machine, and we’ll 
take a flying tour all round the world. Think of 
planing through the sunsets, of rushing upwards 
to the stars. Come, you can’t resist that, I 
know.” 

She laughed with him. 

“But I can do all that too,” she objected. 
“Why shouldn’t I go planing round the world by 
myself ?” 

“If you drive the plane yourself you can’t see 
or enjoy anything. The person who has the fun 
is the observer. So you must have a driver, a 
pilot. You would not want to be boxed up with 


220 OVER LIFE’S EDGE 

an uninteresting stranger? I’m sure you’d rather 
have me.” 

“Ye — es, perhaps so.” 

“Think of our travels, stopping a day and a 
night here and there, sometimes under the palms 
of India or Ceylon, or perhaps on some lone little 
isle in the South Seas. Sometimes in Bagdad, 
sometimes in China, and then planing away 
through space again. We’d have a glorious time, 
and even if you don’t want to marry me, you ought 
to out of kindness. Think! If you saw a little 
cur starving I’m sure you’d give him a bone.” 

“I hope I’m not a bone,” she murmured de- 
murely, the old soft mischief with which she used 
to tease him in former happy days, in her eyes 
and tone. 

“No, but you ought to give the bone to the dog, 
and a nice slim little girl to me. You can make 
one human being perfectly happy in that way, 
and it’s your duty to do it.” 

She laughed, and suddenly stretched out her 
arms to him. 

“Very well, I will do my duty on the under- 
standing we keep out of the world as far as we can, 
in the air or the desert or on the South Seas or the 
top of the Himalayas.” 

“My own !” He folded her in his arms, and she 
lifted her face to his kiss, and if she still felt ex- 
treme doubt and hesitation as to the wisdom of 
the decision she had taken, he was all gladness and 
confidence. For hours they stayed up there in 


REJOICING 221 

the sunshine amongst the waving blossoms of the 
sea pink and caressed by the warm salt breeze. 
And the gulls passed backwards and forwards 
over their heads laughing at them. They had set- 
tled many things before they came back to the 
cavern, and once inside, a new note was struck 
symbolic of the change, commenced and going 
forward. 

“We must have tea together,” Dudley re- 
marked, putting the kettle on the stove; “real, 
civilised, afternoon tea; and after that you must 
get out your serge and see how it fits.” 

Violet sighed, but she made no protest. Once 
having accepted the backbone of the Idea, she 
was not going to complain of the ribs that stuck 
out from it. A certain return to conditions of 
ordinary human life, if not to the world, was 
inevitable. 

“You will come to town with me to be married,” 
Dudley had said, “or do you want me to bring a 
clergyman out to the cavern?” And she had con- 
sented to go to London with him, and afterwards 
they had planned to take a house near Hendon 
and the flying grounds. 

When the tea was made and the bread and 
butter cut by Dudley’s deft fingers, she took some 
of it and ate and drank curiously. How strange 
the hot fluid tasted after four years’ abstinence I 

Dudley was beside himself with light-hearted 
gaiety. He could hardly believe he had won at 
last and the desire of his life was his. He kissed 


222 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


her and thanked her over and over again for her 
decision until at lasit a little real joy in seeing 
another made so happy began to creep into her 
heart. 

“Now go upstairs and dress,” he said with 
solemnity as soon as their tea was finished. “I 
am dying to see you in real clothes again.” 

“Just as you were dying to see me without them 
formerly!” she laughed back at him as she went 
up the rock stairs to the recess where her clothes 
had been stored four years. She dragged them out 
cautiously from the slit in the rocks. The serge 
dress was all crumpled up and had lines of white 
on it where the salt had crystallised, the linen was 
quite yellow, and the material of the stays had 
rotted away leaving the rusted bones exposed. No 
matter, she could do quite well without stays. She 
pulled out the boots next: the leather was rather 
hard and stiff and bright with salt crystals, other- 
wise they seemed good and wearable : the stock- 
ings had remained the same and she drew them on : 
the elastic of the garters was all lifeless. She could 
only twist them round the leg and tie them. She 
found her feet had grown bigger from constant 
unrestraint, and she had hard work to force them 
into the boots, but she did so at last and stood up 
feeling far less secure now on the rock ledge than 
when she could grip it with her toes. She took off 
her much-beloved down and feather suit and put 
on the old linen things that felt cold and clammy 
by contrast. Then taking out the little comb from 


REJOICING 223 

its case, of which she had always taken enormous 
care, she tried to effect some sort of coiffure. Her 
hair had lengthened and thickened In the open air 
life and it was a long time before she had suc- 
ceeded in getting It all Into a coil and fastened 
securely by the very few hairpins she possessed. 
That done at last she slipped into the serge dress : 
the coat-frock she had bought before the war. 
Her figure had not changed much : a little thinner, 
perhaps, it had grown, and the buttons and clasps 
of the dress, though rusty, still worked well 
enough. 

Then, far less comfortable, and very insecure 
on her booted feet, she crept down the stairs and 
was hailed by Dudley with a shout of delight. 

“Brava! You look first-rate,” he said admir- 
ingly. “The dress is a trifle long, for most women 
have their skirts up to their knees now, and It’s 
rather full, but you make a splendid parson’s 
daughter sort of effect, you know.” He came up 
close to her and brushed the salt from her should- 
ers. “Where’s your hat?” 

“The Atlantic has it, that was the one thing it 
robbed me of.” 

Dudley looked at his watch. 

“It isn’t five yet. There’s time to walk into 
Newquay and buy you one.” 

“Oh, it’s such a long walk; you’ve been there 
once to-day, too.” 

“But how can we get one otherwise? I want 


224 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


you to come up by the first train to-morrow and 
you must have hat and gloves.” 

“My gloves are here, but you see they are quite 
stiff and spoiled by the water.” 

“Well, ril get gloves as well. If I start now 
I shall get back easily in time for dinner. Now 
mind, no mussels to-night! We’re going to dine 
on that canned beef and canned pears. Now is 
there anything else you want?” 

“Low want, you mean!” she said laughing. “I 
want none of these things. I was much more 
comfortable without any of them. No, there’s 
nothing else necessary, but a few extra hairpins 
and a hat-pin, mind, don’t forget that; and what 
sort of hat are you going to get me ? I’d like to 
know.” 

“Oh, one of those little round plain ones you 
always used to wear. I know the kind. You 
don’t suppose I’ve forgotten, do you? Well, my 
sweet, good-bye for an hour or two. You are 
such a temptation to me. It’s much better for me 
to have something to do which takes me away 
from you.” 

The girl watched him go. He followed the 
steep, rocky, winding way up from the cavern’s 
mouth to the top of the promontory and walked 
away to the land. The tide was low: an unusual 
length of yellow sand lay uncovered and glowing 
In the golden light. 

When Dudley’s figure had disappeared, Violet 
left the cavern, arid in her new attire, to which 


REJOICING 225 

she was trying to get accustomed, walked up to 
the promontory, over it and down on the far side 
from Newquay on to the sunny silent sands and 
then wandered on slowly eastwards. 

How strange it all seemed that her life here 
was ending. After all It had come very suddenly, 
her assent to Its termination, and even now the 
prospect of change seemed unreal to her. Would 
the Atlantic let her go? she wondered. She and 
the great ocean had become very intimate in all 
that lonely time. And she had come to know that 
it w^as something different from the mere swaying 
mass of water that it is generally supposed to be. 
Although to the limited human brain It was diffi- 
cult to conceive the idea, and still more difficult to 
put into words, she had realised that there was 
some form of individual life in it, some sort of 
brain, too far removed from the human being’s 
for him to understand or even recognise, but none 
the less existing there. She glanced out away over 
the wide stretch of sands on her left to where the 
deep blue line of the ocean was advancing, so 
calm, that Its waves were only little white frills at 
its edge, a few inches high — tiny miniature waves 
that pushed forward with their musical tinkling 
song. She paused and gazed into the brilliant 
distance. Would the Atlantic let her go? Would 
the gulls have told It what they had heard on the 
top of the promontory or would the message have 
gone out to it on the sunny air? Wireless teleg- 
raphy has always existed since the world was a 


226 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


world: spirit has talked with spirit though oceans 
rolled between : scenes enacted thousands of miles 
away have been clearly seen by sleepers who have 
thought them on waking merely dreams until they 
learned the visions were truth, and letters or tele- 
grams repeated to them the happenings and actual 
facts, of which their dreams had been merely 
pictures, flashed over to them, perhaps from the 
other side of the world. 

An intense melancholy came over her. No joy 
of the bride-elect touched her. She had always 
shrunk from love as a personal matter: to write 
about, yes, it was delightful because you could 
idealise it and lift it into the region of sunset 
glories and all magnificent elation and enthusi- 
asms, but love for herself, sex love, as a fetter on 
her freedom, as a lessening of personal individu- 
ality and independence, she did not like the idea 
of at all. She sat down on a flat rock because 
already she felt fatigued in her new armour, she 
who could walk barefoot for miles without tiring. 
The boots cramped her feet, now grown ac- 
customed to expand and contract with each step 
as does the natural foot, not imprisoned in leather; 
the artificial elevation of the heels tired her spine 
with its tip forward. The serge dress felt hot and 
heavy. She sat down and gazed away to her cool, 
majestic lover, the sea that she was abandoning, 
who had protected her and caressed her so gently 
and had asked for nothing in return. Great tears 


REJOICING 227 

gathered in her eyes and rolled slowly down her 
cheeks. 

Meanwhile Dudley, absolutely content and 
happy, had pursued his way along the sunny cliff 
edge and arrived at Newquay, he bought a neat 
little round turban hat of dark blue with hatpin 
complete, and marched triumphantly out of the 
shop with it in a paper bag, not minding at all 
the sly giggles of the young ladles in the show 
room; he then sought out the best gloves he could 
find and bought three packets of hairpins. Then 
after a hasty whiskey and soda at one of the 
hotels, set out on his homeward way. 

The evening was calm and golden: a beautiful 
light lay over sea and land, the turf along the edge 
of the cliffs felt springy beneath his feet, far, far 
below lay the smooth sands, and In the distance 
came laughing and frolicking In the tiny waves. 
Up there amongst the sea pink and flowering gorse 
birds were singing, and his heart seemed to sing 
with them. He was in those few minutes which 
life here and there allows of joy to man. He had 
a great desire and saw now the way clear to its 
attainment. He walked on quickly, his whole 
being, all his pulses, bounding with joy. And far 
below and far away the little waves laughed and 
prattled with Infantine voices to each other of 
secret affairs of their own. 

Violet met him at the cavern entrance, still 
dressed In civilised attire. She felt he would be 
disappointed If he found she had laid It aside. 


228 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


When she saw him with joy shining out of every 
feature she felt a little comforted. It was some- 
thing, after all, to make another so intensely 
happy. Dudley was radiant. He kissed her as 
he came in, pressed her close to him and shewed 
her the hat, enthusiastically. She smiled and put 
it on. 

“Perfect, you look charming!” he told her, 
and here are your other things. I have forgotten 
nothing.” He was so elated, so pleased with 
himself and with her and everything that a re- 
sponsive nature like hers could not fail to be af- 
fected by his mood, and the sweet peace of the 
evening, and the lovely play of light and colour 
beyond the entrance added to the charm of the 
hour. 

She had set out all that he had asked for on 
their rock table and led him up to it. 

Dudley sat down gladly. The cool of the in- 
terior was grateful after the heat of the walk, the 
green and crimson shadows of the rock and the 
soft reflected light, restful after the glare. 

The girl took a very little of all the different 
things he pressed on her and only just sipped the 
wine. She knew she must go back very slowly to 
the old ways and Dudley enjoyed everything and 
gazed at her affectionately, saying she was like a 
little bird at his table picking up the crumbs. 

Had the position been reversed, she would have 
become immediately aware of a lack of joyousness 
in him, but Dudley being a man, did not bother 


REJOICING 229 

greatly about his companion’s thoughts or moods. 
He was happy, he had got what he wanted, that 
was the main point, and he smiled and acquiesced 
In all his glowing plans and pictures, he probed no 
deeper, but like a child remained content with the 
surface. 

After dinner they went to the threshold and sat 
there, his arm closely round her, her head pressed 
back on his shoulder, while he smoked and talked 
gaily and sketched out for her their tour of the 
world, and the light shifted and deepened and 
fell. 

At about the eighth cigarette Dudley sugge«^ted 
they should go and sleep. They were to be up 
early to-morrow. They thought they would leave 
the cavern as It stood, taking very little with them. 
She had nothing, and he had few personal pos- 
sessions there. The food, wine, tools, stove and 
stores would not be much use to them away from 
the cavern. All that they would want was already 
waiting for them both at his rooms In Newquay 
and at their houses In town, while to leave the 
cavern fully furnished was to have another home 
by the sea, a bungalow ready for them to repair 
to at any time they fancied. 

Obediently the girl rose. She was not sleepy, 
but she knew how far Dudley had walked that 
day. He must be needing rest. She kissed him 
very sweetly and wished him good-night, and then 
climbed to her lofty perch and lay down only to 


230 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


stare upwards in the summer twilight to the roof 
above her with wide-open, untired eyes. 

She heard Dudley moving about below for a 
little time, then he put out the lamp and all grew 
quiet. Still she could not sleep: a great restless- 
ness possessed her, and when an hour or two of 
silence had passed she felt she must rise and move ; 
she could not stay there on the rock shelf any 
longer. Very quietly, so as not to disturb the 
sleeper below, she descended and found her way 
down noiselessly to the level floor. She walked to 
the threshold of the cavern and looked out. The 
moon was rising and a dull silver radiance poured 
over the sea, wTich seemed coming in with ex- 
traordinary volume. Huge, rolling billows swept 
along shoreward at an unusual speed. Swift and 
silent as they passed the promontory, they flung 
themselves upon the distant shore behind it with 
a hollow, reverberating roar that shook the air 
in the cavern and went echoing and re-echoing all 
down the coast. 

The surface of the water, usually at this time of 
half high tide some way down the face of the rock, 
now brimmed up almost to the entrance. There 
seemed something menacing about its fulness and 
exuberance, a threat in those long swift waves 
that raced like wolves to the shore. But how 
magnificent it was, how she loved that great glim- 
mering plain before her, home of the wandering 
winds and the glorious melodies of the singing 
caverns. A great soul calm fell upon her, wholly 


REJOICING 231 

different from the strained feverish mood of the 
day. She had taken off again the tight constrict- 
ing dress. She was now In her feather suit, her 
bare feet, occasionally splashed over by the surf, 
stood on the rock, her hair blew back from her 
face in its long strands on the wind. A great 
quiet, In contrast to the fierce tumult of the sea, 
seemed gathering in her heart. As she looked 
Into the vastness of the night, pregnant with the 
coming storm, she felt herself one with all this 
greatness, a part of something so mighty, sa 
grand, so elemental, that she must for ever be 
safe and secure. Her resolution to leave It all 
and return to the miniature life of the world passed 
from her brain: It was eliminated from her con- 
sciousness. For the time being she was, as she 
had been so long, one with the elements. And 
now the great bell came pealing over the waters. 
The tide had reached that exact point where it 
enters the caverns on the coast and draws out all 
their melodies. Wildly lovely, more startlingly 
distinct than she had ever heard them came the 
songs of the sirens over the heaving sea. She 
looked up, the sky was very clear, only now and 
then little skifts and whirls of cloud floated across 
the face of the rising moon and dulled the radi- 
ance on the huge mirror of the ocean and on the 
far-distant horizon was a band of velvet darkness 
without stars, and from out of that distance 
poured ever increasing battalions of waves that 


232 OVER LIFE’S EDGE 

rose higher and higher and raced more swiftly to 
the land. 

It was a long time before a feeling of fatigue 
swept over her and she turned back to the interior 
of the cavern. As she passed to the rock stair- 
case she saw in the glow from the still burning 
stove Dudley lying fast asleep and looking very 
warm and comfortable in his blankets, with all 
the impedimenta of civilization, his biscuit cans, 
his coffee pot, his box of cigarettes, his books 
spread on the low flat rocks round him. 

She paused and looked thoughtfully to the en- 
trance and listened. 

Above the beautiful wild clarion call of the bell, 
above the exquisite music of the siren voices, was 
a strange continuous moan. She knew it was the 
voice of the rising wund. Even as she looked 
towards the silvery light beyond the cavern’s 
mouth, a handful of flying spray was thrown into 
it and dashed against the roof. She bent over the 
sleeping man and touched his shoulder. He was 
awake in a moment. 

“Dudley!” 

“Yes. What is it?” 

“There will be a very high tide to-night. I 
think you had better come upstairs with me. I 
think the whole floor of the cavern, even this 
higher part may be covered.” 

Dudley sat up and looked at her. To share the 
rock shelf with her, to have her dear presence so 
close to him and yet to know he must not stretch 


REJOICING 233 . 

out his arms to her was a trial and a temptation 
that he did not like to face. 

Yet after all be had stood so much and suffered 
so long and now his deliverance was so soon at 
hand, that surely he could trust himself a little 
longer, and a sleepless night was wiser to face 
than a struggle with the ocean on that rocky floor, 
trying to drag its victim out to the depths. 

He got up. 

“I expect you’re right. I hear the wind rising. 
Well, we’d better move all these things to safety.”' 

He rolled up the blankets he had been lying on 
and ran up the rocky steps with them and the girl 
lifted his many precious possessions up on tO' the 
highest shelves and projection she could find. The 
stove they lifted together and put far back on a 
solid ledge near the upper chamber. 

“You don’t think there is any danger of the 
tide rising high enough to swamp us? There 
wouldn’t be much chance for us if a big wave 
flowed in here?” Dudley questioned as they 
worked. 

“I don’t think so. In all the time I’ve been 
here, I have never seen the water deeper than a 
few inches over the floor, even in the highest 
tides.” 

“Still, we know it must have been accustomed 
at one time to rise to the top of the promontory, 
or this cavern would never have been formed 
at all.” 

“If there were much of a storm we shouldn’t 


234 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


be very well off outside. I have seen the wind 
here sweep everything before it.” 

Dudley stopped in his clearing up. 

“I wonder if it would be best to leave the cave 
for to-night,” he said uneasily. 

“Where would you go?” laughed the girl as 
she ranged his books neatly in a niche in the wall, 
“back to Newquay and get a bed at the Victoria?” 

“Well, I don’t know . . . but, somehow ” 

He could not define the want of confidence, the 
sense of insecurity that seemed to have suddenly 
grown up inside him. 

“We should have a seven mile walk first, and 
it’s now past midnight. It would be after one in 
the morning when we got there. They might not 
take us in. Here we are masters of Time : in the 
world men are slaves to it. You never can do this, 
that, or the other, because it’s ‘not the time for 
it.’ ” 

She finished her task, then came up to him and 
took his hand. 

“Come and look at the sea. It’s a grand sight. 
There’s no storm really. It’s only a full tide.” 

They went together and looked out over the 
great silver undulating plain. 

There is something extraordinarily impressive 
about a rough sea on a clear moonlight night. 
With storms of wind and rain we expect it to be 
agitated: often in the veils of rain and obscuring 
darkness we cannot see it in its full might. But 
when the night is clear and the moon flooding it. 


REJOICING 235 

then to look out upon Its vast body in convulsion, 
to see all its majestic force and hear its mighty 
voice, without any apparent existing cause, is to 
feel that in itself lies some tremendous vital power, 
something akin to the brain of man that moves it 
mysteriously from within. 

“Great, glossy-backed monster,” the girl mur- 
mured as they stood looking at it. “I believe 
it’s alive.” 

“Rather too much alive to please me to-night,” 
returned Dudley as they heard the crash with 
which the waves fell on the shore and the screech 
of the undertow as the tide sucked It back over 
the rocks. 

“It hasn’t risen much In the last quarter of an 
hour,” the girl said, looking over the edge. “I 
think w€ shall be all right. In all the winter 
storms I’ve never been flooded out.” 

And because he was physically tired, and any 
other course meant a good deal of effort, he ac- 
quiesced In her view and turned back with her to 
the interior with a feeling of thankfulness in his 
heart which he did not express, that to-morrow 
they would be out of this place and away from 
it all. 

They re-commenced their clearing up and put- 
ting away, and In a little while the floor was clear, 
left free for the waters to wander over at their 
will. 

Then they climbed up the rock stairs to their 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


236 

top shelf, which lifted them a good thirty feet 
above the floor. 

The girl lay down amongst her feathers close 
to the rock wall. Dudley rolled himself round 
in his blankets and took the outside edge. 

‘‘Darling! mayn’t I take you just once in my 
arms? What harm could it do?” 

“No, you know you mayn’t. Don’t be silly and 
spoil your good record.” 

“It would make me so very happy.” 

“I am afraid you can’t be happy until we are 
married in St. George’s, Hanover Square, or 
wherever you’ve fixed the delightful ceremony is 
to be.” 

“But why shouldn’t we marry here at a rock 
altar and let those siren voices, as you call them, 
sing our epithalamium?” 

“Because I don’t want to. If you will drag me 
back into a worldly existence, we must do as the 
world does. Now don’t talk any more. I want 
to listen to the music. Go to sleep.” And as he 
was really tired out by the day’s work in that 
vigorous air, after a time Dudley did fall asleep, 
and the girl lay listening for a long time to the 
glorious flood of sound that filled the place. Then, 
lulled by it, she too fell asleep. 

Some hours before the dawn she awoke sud- 
denly. Eyes flew open against a dazzling, inter- 
mittent light, her forehead was wet where the 
surf had struck It; a thunderous deafening noise 
split the air round her. She sat up and looked 


REJOICING 237 

to the cave mouth. Blocking it completely from 
rocky threshold to high-pitched lofty roof, was 
one great solid mass of green water which the 
moonlight behind it looked like a wall of clear, 
translucent jelly. The next instant, with a bellow- 
ing roar, the wall fell, and the huge wave, a mass 
of seething foam, glittering white in the moon- 
light, poured with a roaring hiss into the cavern. 
It rushed to the interior wall and there, balked 
of further progress, ran straight up it to the roof 
and thence fell in a drenching, shrieking shower 
to mingle with a comrade wave just bursting 
through the entrance. 

The girl struggled to her knees and looked 
towards the cavern mouth. She recognised their 
Fate. This was Death. There was no escape. 
For one awful moment she felt a shock of appal- 
ling fear shake her heart. All the recoil of youth- 
ful life in its full strength poured for a moment a 
mad, unutterable terror into her soul: face to 
face with Death, its cold hands on her throat; a 
few seconds more she would be locked in its grip. 
They were entrapped. There was no escape. 
There was no outlet to the cavern except its ocean- 
facing mouth: no hole in the sides: no chimney 
to the roof. Beyond the cavern there were the 
monstrous waves blocking the doorway; behind 
them the boiling sea. The next instant the terror 
dropped from her. It seemed to fall as a mantle 
slips from the shoulders. Her soul rose on tip- 
toe within her. A great wonder, a curiosity. 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


238 

possessed her. Here now she was to learn the 
secret of the ages: solve the problem that stares 
u's gloomily in the face our whole lives through. 
In a moment she would know everything, or 
nothing. Was it to be a throwing open or a 
slamming to of the great door that stands be- 
tween Life and Death? 

For a second thoughts of the life she was leav- 
ing rushed through her, the world and all its 
beauties came before her, her fame, her powers; 
even a view of the house standing waiting to re- 
ceive her, and the portrait of that lovely sacred 
face which now would be left without a guardian; 
her glorious jewels: whom would they adorn? 
All these images, like sparks in a smoke cloud, 
glinted for a second past her mental vision. 

Then nothing but the supreme question filled 
her: Would It be extended Life or Death? and 
above this again, but woven with It, the great 
query, would she meet again that One for whom 
and with whom she had lived her whole life? 

For a moment no great wave obscured the 
entrance and the moonlight poured through; Its 
silver flood, intensified by the whirlpool of seeth- 
ing white surf in the cavern, made the Interior 
brilliant with light. She looked down at Dudley. 
She saw his eyes were open and read in them 
that he, too, recognised this was Death. 

So many times he had faced it on the battlefield, 
for so many years he had lain down and got up 
with Death as a close neighbour, and yet here. 


REJOICING 239 

now, rising from the sea, calling him In the dead 
of night, Death had its unspeakable horror for 
him. It must be so, for whatever the fate of our 
Soul, our physical frame can never tolerate that 
which means its disintegration and utter destruc- 
tion. There was no possibility of speech, for 
the countless sounds of the whirling maelstrom 
beneath their shelf, the slap and rush of waters 
against the walls, the roar of the wind and thun- 
der of the waves, cut all sound straight from the 
lip. Each saw in that one look towards the closed 
door of the trap that the other knew their fate. 

Dudley rose to his knees and threw his arms 
round the girl. In his last moments his desire for 
her rose to its highest pitch, this dear thing he had 
loved and coveted so long, and the Idea of her and 
his love for her was so sweet as compared with 
the noisome one of extinction that he yielded to 
it. It was as if the body trembling before Its 
conqueror. Death, seized his love and pushed it 
forward as a shield. 

He elapsed her tightly to him In a straining 
hold. If he could die In the Intoxication of pas- 
sion, suffocated against her warm neck Instead of 
in those whirling eddies of surf! 

As for Violet, she was beyond the reach now of 
earthly things. She knelt on the edge of rock 
and looked over, now at the cauldron below, now 
towards the entrance where the messengers from 
the Atlantic were coming in to fetch her. Her 
whole soul was clamouring for freedom, for 


240 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


knowledge, and burning with expectation. Was 
now the blessed divine moment at hand when she 
should see Her, when they should meet again? 

Dudley’s arms were round her, his hot hands 
pressing hard on her breasts, his Ups seeking hers. 
She paid no heed. She was unconscious alike of 
his presence as of his passion. He was as one 
who clasps an empty garment from which its 
owner has slid away. Suddenly the cavern turned 
to blackness as a huge w^ave filled the entrance. 
The girl stared at it. Within its great, white, 
breaking crest there seemed two green eyes which 
glared upon her as the monster charged thunder- 
ing into the cave. It swept up to the ledge higher 
than any of its forerunners, and seized as almost 
by colossal hands, Dudley’s body, and tore him 
away from her, twisted him and flung him up- 
ward, dashing him against the cavern roof. A 
shower of warm blood fell on her shoulders from 
his mangled form, but she was past feeling it. 
She crouched immovable on the edge of rock and 
saw him, pallid and broken, borne by her in a 
seething swirl of crimson foam out through the 
cavern’s mouth into the boiling silver sea beyond. 
Her messenger must come soon. She saw it ad- 
vance from the outside, a great arching wave, 
shaking its tremendous mane, shewing its white 
teeth, bounding on like some great glorious beast 
of prey. She, who had always believed the 
Atlantic to be a living, sentient being, though 
endowed with a form of life the human mind can- 


REJOICING 241 

not understand, felt that she knew it now, watch- 
ing this wave sent to fetch her. As- it crashed 
into the cavern she stretched out her arms to it, 
and it lifted her from the ledge and threw her 
to the roof* Her neck was broken by the first 
blow, and her body fell to the water, circling 
round in the foam, washing aimlessly about in 
the porphyry home she had lived in so long. 

But she could see it! She was a living thing! 
The great door of Death had swung upon its 
hinges, but swung open into light! 

With that terrific blow upon her head, her soul 
had rushed out into free existence and an astound- 
ing joy, a triumph for which there is no name, 
filled her. 

As we see in dreams, when our body is lying 
with closed eyes in sleep, so she looked down 
and saw now her body, like a veil of flesh, washed 
about in the swash of the tide. As in dreams our 
senses become intensely acute, so now she heard 
all the clashing, disputing noises in fhe cavern, 
and smelt the keen sharp breath of the sea. 

That consciousness in the brain which survives 
sleep and wanders about in the sunshine, seeing 
and hearing, and feeling most intensely, had sur- 
vived also bodily Death, and here she found her- 
self the same being, overflowing with energy and 
enthusiasm. In a state that only at rare moments 
In life can the body be keyed up to. 

Now that existence was proved, would there 
also be recognition? Over the heaving waters, 


242 


OVER LIFE’S EDGE 


playing with her own pulseless body, she looked 
to the cavern’s mouth, and there in the silver 
light she saw again, as perfectly, as vividly as she 
had seen it in a thousand dreams, her Mother’s 
face. Every beautiful perfect feature, the won- 
derful arch of the brows over the glorious eyes, 
the exquisite lips, the ineffable smile. 

Recognition, then, identity, was also a truth. 

Wild with a joy such as had always filled their 
earthly meetings, she passed over the water, as we 
pass in dreams, where, though everything is in- 
tensely real, surpassing the feeling of reality we 
have in waking life, nothing successfully opposes 
us, and floated out into silver space. 

“My darling,” and once again those arms 
elapsed her, in whose cradle she had first seen 
the light of this world. 

So they met again in the silver air above the 
surging waters of the Atlantic. The night itself 
was calm and clear, except for the power of the 
wind, w'hich drove shorewards the great billows 
rising in a storm area in mid ocean, and so piling 
up a tide not known for many years. The two 
spirits strained and clung together in that same 
ovenvhelming joy they had known on earth, talk- 
ing, laughing, as we talk and laugh in our dreams, 
each with a thousand questions to ask and answer 
after that wondrous separation of four years. 

“Where are they all? All the others who have 
gone before?” asked Violet. “Where is Dudley? 
He was killed just before I w^as.” 


REJOICING 243 

“He floated past me and was joined by his 
parents. They were watching for him and I for 
you. I wanted to be alone to greet you. All these 
years I have watdhed by the cavern’s mouth, not 
knowing when you might get free.” 

“I tried to come before . . 

And so they passed over the moonlit sea, beside 
the singing caverns all down the lonely coast, and 
enfolded in an unutterable joy, floated, ascending 
ever higher and higher, going — whither? 


THE END. 


They Were Alone . . . . 

The magic of the desert night had closed about 
them. Cairo, friends, — civilization as she knew 
it — were left far behind. She, an unbeliever, 
was in the heart of the trackless wastes with a 
man whose word was more than law. 

And yet, he was her slave ! 

‘T shall ask nothing of you until you shall love 
me,’' he promised. “You shall draw your cur- 
tains, and until you call, you shall go undis- 
turbed.” 

And she believed him! 

Do you want to see luxury beyond your Imag- 
ination to conjure, — feel the softness of silks 
finer than the gossamer web of the spider — ^hear 
the night voices of the throbbing desert, or sway 
to the jolting of the clanking caravan? 

Egypt, Arabia pass before your eyes. The 
impatient cursing of the camel men comes to 
your ears. Your nostrils quiver in the acrid 
smoke of the little fires of dung that flare in the 
darkness when the caravan halts. The night has 
shut off prying eyes. Yashmaks are lowered. 
White flesh gleams against burnished bands of 
gold. The children of Allah are at home. 

And the promise he had given her?. . .let Joan 
Conquest, who knows and loves the East, tell 
you in 

13ESERT LOVE 

For sale wherever hooks are sold, or from 

The Macaulay Company 

PUBUSHERS 

15-17 W. 38th St. New York 




r 




































